


you cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

by arbitrarily



Category: Prime Suspect (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:20:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Look at this: a united front; Jane and Reg return to the city.</i> Written November 2011, post 1x08.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written way back when the show was still airing, and as such, anything after 1x08, when Jane and Reg went upstate, is totally non-canon compliant. In other news, I really miss this show.

  
  
  
  
  


> we both want the very same thing.  
> we are praying   
> i am the one to save you  
> but you don’t even own  
> your own violence
> 
> ( _JOANNA NEWSOM_ )
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> J A N E :  _You need a new home_.
> 
> R E G :  _Like fun I do. But if I did, you’re not the man who’s going to give it to me_.
> 
> ( _PRIME SUSPECT_ )

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane wants a cigarette.   
  
She taps her fingers along the arm of her chair.  
  
Scratch that. She  _needs_  a cigarette.   
  
She sighs instead, smacks her lips as she chews an ever increasingly stale piece of gum. She jiggles her foot, drips some of the melting slush onto the carpet, but the shrink doesn’t say anything about it.  
  
By Jane’s count, she’s figuring she’s got a couple more sessions left with the doc before Sweeney will consider her psychologically sound, fit to work, whatever. She’s figuring at this rate she’ll be back on the beat a week or two before Thanksgiving.   
  
“You seem to be coping well,” Dr. Stevens says. She is still looking down at the legal pad in her lap, scribbling something and Jane finds her words and the action to be at odds with one another.   
  
“I try,” Jane says drily.   
  
Things fall apart, is what she wants to say. Collateral damage. Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.   
  
Her eyes drift over to the window. It snowed the night before but today there is only gray. Heavy clouds loom, threatening more.   
  
“Why don’t you tell me about your working relationship with, uh, with Detective Duffy?”  
  
Jane frowns. She stops tapping her fingers. She does not know what kind of question this is or what Dr. Stevens is trying to get at with it.   
  
“Detective Duffy, huh,” Jane says, and then she pauses.   
  
But this is later. This is a long time later.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _O N E ;_**  
  
  
  
  
This starts outside the city.  
  
A cut to the chase, a peek at the back of the book: they sleep together the same night as the shoot-out. Jane and Reg sleep together for the first time in a rundown Holiday Inn upstate.   
  
It’s the sort of thing in retrospect Jane should have seen coming. It’s the sort of thing that is most surprising in how completely unsurprising it is at all.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Reg meets them at the hospital. He meets her over in the South Wing, by the very bank of elevators where this all began, and Jane can’t help but laugh. The sound comes out wheezy and tight, and she pats Amanda on the arm as she is whisked back off to her room.  
  
“Radiology’s in the basement,” she finally says to Reg, like that somehow explains everything. She bends over at the waist and takes a deep breath, still winded, still exhausted. She’s still sweating, her sweater lost somewhere in the basement of that fucking hospital, her thin tank top clinging to her.   
  
Reg is looking at her like he wants to kill her, like he wants to finish the job this Roy guy started, but there’s also something else there. Something that reads along the lines of utterly exhausting relief, and that, she thinks, is unexpected.  
  
“You’re all right,” he finally says after a beat, and Jane frowns at that. When he says it again -- “You’re all right?” -- it sounds more like a question, and he asks it again and again. He says: “You’re all right? You all right? The kid’s okay? Everyone? Everyone’s -- okay?”  
  
Jane stares at him, and then she sort of waves him off, breathes heavy when she says, “Yeah.” And then: “Deputy’s dead. Roy -- he was the other guy, the guy who did the parents.”  
  
Reg’s shoes squeak against the linoleum when he steps towards her. He’s soaking wet, dripping rainwater everywhere, and Jane crosses her arms over her chest as she looks up at him.  
  
“You?” he asks, and she nods.  
  
“Hunted us through the goddamned basement. I got the drop on him, and. Yeah.”  
  
She can’t read Reg’s face. He simply looks tired, tired and wet, but that something else, the other part, she doesn’t know what to call it. “I was calling you,” he says, voice quiet, edged with steel. “Before. I was -- I was calling you.”  
  
“You knew?” She frowns. “How’d you know?”  
  
“Print came back his. Guys called it in.”  
  
“Hmmm,” she murmurs. And then, “No signal in the basement.”  
  
He won’t stop looking at her, and she suddenly feels just as tired as he looks. She screws her mouth up in a smirk and gives him a quick once over, laughs silently at the puddle of rainwater he’s standing in.  
  
“Bet you really wish you packed a bag now, huh.”  
  
“Alright, smart-ass. The point’s been well-taken.”  
  
“I just like being right.” She takes a deep breath. “Well, we should probably go see about alternative lodging accommodations. Considering our last is now a crime scene.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The Sheriff points them in the direction of a decent Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town (“There are outskirts? You’re telling me these are the skirts?” Reg had groused under his breath and Jane had snorted). They grab two rooms there, both on the fourth floor, five doors down from each other.   
  
Jane showers. She sits alone in her room on top of the bedspread with a bottle of bourbon.   
  
Before the hotel, they had swung by a Wal-Mart after stopping at the motel to grab Jane’s stuff, and Jane had mocked each item of clothing Reg bought to replace his own soaking wet clothes.   
  
“Mention an overnight bag one more time, Jane, and I swear . . . ” She had pantomimed a lock and key at her lips, but he still scowled at her.   
  
She had poached a bottle of bourbon from the sheriff’s office when they stopped there so she could make a statement about their now deceased deputy. She has already emptied it a considerable amount, but she still can’t sleep. She can’t sleep, she can’t turn her brain off, can’t stop repeating either shoot-out in her head, and she really doesn’t want to think about any of it.   
  
So she doesn't think. She doesn’t think it through. She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, eyeballs the alarm clock (1:03 AM), and she calls Reg.   
  
He answers on the first ring. “You OK?” he asks near immediately, and she rolls her eyes.  
  
“I’m  _fine_. I can’t sleep, but I’m fine. I take it you’re up.”  
  
He sighs. “I’m up.”  
  
“Well, I got booze. Be over in a minute.”   
  
She grabs the bottle of bourbon and she shuffles over to Reg’s room.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _T W O ;_**  
  
  
  
  
It’s not until she’s standing outside the door to his hotel room, her hand raised to knock, that she realizes how potentially weird this is.  
  
But then, she thinks as she knocks, this entire trip has been weird. Their entire last shared twenty-four hours have been the very definition of weird and random and impossible to explain.  
  
He answers the door in a pair of striped boxers and a gray t-shirt she is pretty sure he bought at Wal-Mart a couple of hours ago. Her mouth twists in a crooked closed-mouth smile as she looks at him; she’s pretty sure she’s never seen Reg outside of a shirt and tie, and there’s something bizarrely humbling (she is thinking the word humbling because she is unsure what other adjective to use for him in this moment) about him this undressed.  
  
“Nice PJs,” she teases, and pushes past him into his hotel room.  
  
“You one to talk,” he says as he shuts the door. She looks down at herself, at the ratty Yankees t-shirt and the sweatpants, and merely shrugs.   
  
There’s nowhere to sit in the room save for the bed, so she sits on the bed beside Reg. They drink out of the glasses housekeeping left in his bathroom (“Rinse those out, who knows what kinda cooties are all up in there”), and for awhile, they drink in silence. He has a bad early-90s action movie playing on the television, the volume too low to really hear, but Jane doesn’t really mind it. It’s just nice not to be alone -- something she would never admit out loud to him.   
  
He matches her drink for drink, and they burn through the bottle of bourbon quickly.   
  
“You know,” she says to him, slouched low against one of his pillows, and he glances sidelong at her. “I feel almost bad for ragging on Sweeney, telling him I wanted to stay back . . . like that’s where the action was or whatever.”   
  
“Yeah. Who knew we’d meet up with the cast of  _Deliverance_  up here in the sticks.”  
  
She tries to whistle the theme from  _Deliverance_  but fails. Reg arches an eyebrow.  
  
“You’re a terrible whistler.”  
  
“Nah, I’m just off my game is all.” She tries again, and he watches her. He’s watching her mouth, which, of all things (not that they are on his bed together, not that they are as undressed as the other has seen them, but this -- his eyes on her mouth) feels incredibly intimate.  
  
She smacks her lips together and throws back the remaining bourbon in her glass. He’s still looking at her. He’s looking at her the way he looked at her back at the hospital, but it’s darker than that somehow. There’s heat behind his gaze instead of just concern, and it surprises her (except for how it doesn’t) that meeting his eye makes her clench low in her gut.   
  
And, god. Maybe it’s all just been pretext. Maybe she knew the second she reached for her phone to call him that she would wind up here, like this. Maybe he knew it too, and that’s why he said yes. He wanted it.   
  
And then.  
  
And then his hand is right there, on the mattress beside her own. Or it’s always been there and she is just now noticing. She’s just now noticing the proximity -- his proximity to her, her proximity to him. She wants to say she’s just now noticing him, but that’s a lie. That’s a lie she doesn’t know what to do with, so she ignores it. She focuses instead on how the bourbon is sticking in her mouth, how perfectly tipsy and almost drunk she feels.   
  
How his room is almost too warm. How she can’t even hear the television right now, just the two of them, just their breathing.   
  
How he is still looking at her, how she is still looking at him.  
  
The sound the bottom of her glass makes when she sets it down on the nightstand beside her is loud. Reg watches her without comment.  
  
His hand is still there, between their bodies on the bed.  
  
She doesn't think it through.  
  
She grabs his hand by the wrist and drags his hand down between her legs. He exhales loudly (like he was waiting for this, she does not allow herself to think), but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t pull away from her, but he also does not move. His hand is warm against her, she can feel it, even through her sweats, and it makes her realize just how much she wants this.   
  
Her voice cracks when she says, barely audible, “I  _need_  -- ” but he seems to get it. He must get it, because his fingers move against her, at first tentatively and then with intent.   
  
He rubs her through her pants, and she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, her neck arching back. She can hear him, breathing loud beside her. His hand moves firmer and firmer against her until she is grinding down against him -- her hips raising, rolling into him. She bites her bottom lip, can feel her shirt sticking to the sweat collecting down her spine, can feel the bed shift under her as he shifts closer to her.  
  
It is as though they reach the same moment of frustration at the exact same time (which all things considered about the two of them isn’t all that surprising). Their frustration, often aimed at the other, has always seemed to run in tandem. He pulls his hand away suddenly and yanks at the drawstring of her sweatpants. He doesn’t even pull them down: he merely slips his hand under the waistband, under her panties, and she hisses when his fingers slick first against and then inside her. She hears Reg groan (“ _Jesus_  . . . ”) when he touches her, but the angle is all wrong, his wrist twisted funny, and when her fingers latch on to his forearm he pulls his hand away. His whole body turns towards her and he reaches for her with his right hand, replacing his left with his right, and slides his hand back down her stomach, back between her legs. He balances himself on his elbow beside her and works two fingers inside of her. Her stomach hollows and then fills as she rolls her hips into the movement of his hand.   
  
He is harsh with her, the back of his hand stretching her panties, the elastic biting in low on her hips, each jerk of his fingers into her deep and almost punishing.   
  
He’s breathing heavily beside her and she’s finding it hard to look at him. Like looking at him would somehow make this that much more intimate. That there can be distance achieved so long as she doesn’t look at him, so long as she doesn’t watch him. But he’s watching her -- something bright and critical in his eye, but not unkind. His eyes keep drifting from her face down to her breasts, still covered by the thin t-shirt she threw on to sleep in, then back up to her mouth, her eyes.   
  
Her heels skid against the mattress when she bends her knees, when she wrenches her sweats, her panties, down her legs, and his body pushes that much closer to her own. She can feel him, hard against her leg, his hips rubbing slightly against her thigh as his hand works between her legs. She kicks the clothes off her ankles, off the bed, her body bare and exposed to him. His eyes focus on his hand, his fingers disappearing into her cunt; his breath catches. He doesn’t say anything, but his fingers increase their pace, his thumb rubs at her clit, and Jane makes a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Jane throws an arm over her face, unable to watch him.   
  
She’s silent when he makes her come, the tendons in her neck corded tight as she arches away from him. Her fingers wrap tight around his wrist (the wrist of the hand fucking her), but he does not still, he pushes her through it. She thinks that he would keep going, that he won’t stop, that he has found some perverse pleasure in watching her unravel, so maybe that’s why she kisses him. That’s why she kisses him. It’s why she grabs him by the back of the neck and smashes her mouth against his, why she pulls at him, makes him get on top of her, his fingers still curled and pushing inside her.   
  
He yields immediately, though any offered acquiescence morphs quickly into aggression as he kisses her hard, as he slides his leg between hers and starts rocking against her. She bites at his mouth, and he bites back. His fingers slip from her, and when he grabs at her thigh she can feel them, wet against her skin, and she shivers. She can taste the bourbon on his tongue, and she likes that. She likes that he seems to be as lost to this -- whatever this is -- as she is: no question grounding any of his actions, no question to anything he does to her.   
  
Jane pushes at his shoulder. She wants to roll them, wants some semblance of control back, and he goes with it. He lets her take the lead, and she quirks an eyebrow up as she settles against him, as she straddles him. His eyes narrow in return and she can see his mouth souring. She finds it familiar, the easy antagonism between them, and she laughs low in her throat as she grinds against him, the curve of his cock hot against her even through his boxers.   
  
He palms her ass, asks her, “What?” His voice is rough, and that makes her mouth crack into a filthy grin.  
  
“Didn’t think you’d like a woman on top. Didn’t think you were the type,” she says, her fingers toying with the waistband of his boxers. She rocks against him again and she catches the tic at the hinge of his jaw, the way his teeth clench, so she does it again. He lifts his hips when she finally drags his boxers down to his thighs, practically panting under her. When she wraps her hand around him, he hisses, licks at his mouth, his eyes dark as he watches her -- her face, her hand, her cunt.   
  
“You don’t think,” he says tightly, his voice just this side of wrecked. “That’s your problem,” he says.  
  
“Yeah?” she murmurs. She says  _yeah_  again, but more to herself than to him as she slicks herself over his cock, her fingers squeezing at the base.  
  
“Jesus,” Reg whispers, his hands roaming over her, grabbing at her thighs, her hips, her ass.  
  
She sinks down onto him slowly, so slowly, liking the way he’s stretching her, how it burns just enough, but it’s too slow for him. His fingers dig into her hips painfully, like he’s restraining himself from just dragging her down onto him, slamming his hips up against hers.   
  
She whimpers softly as she begins to ride him, and that single sound alone seems to undo what little control he possessed.   
  
He arches up, changing the angle inside her, and her fingers bite into his shoulders; she ducks her head as she moans quietly. He hauls himself up against her, her knees slipping on the bedspread as he thrusts up into her. He gnaws at the hollow of her throat, all tongue and teeth and wet heat. One hand keeps her anchored at her hip, but the other pulls at her t-shirt until they are both dragging it up over her head. His fingers are rough with her nipple, so she presses her open mouth to his, makes him swallow whatever sound she might have made.   
  
He flips them without warning, stronger than she anticipated, and she can’t decide if that’s more unfair to him or to her. He starts driving into her, hard, and when she gasps the noise is high and thready, foreign to her.   
  
The bed is noisy, almost comically so, the springs protesting under them, squeaking and whining, and she thinks that she’d laugh, but she doesn’t really have the breath for it.  
  
He comes snarling unintelligibly against her neck, with her legs wrapped tight and sweaty around his waist. His body still trembling against hers, he reaches a hand down between them. He thumbs at her clit until she starts clenching around him, grabbing at his shoulders. She doesn’t come quietly this time. She groans wordlessly, his breath hot against her ear, hitching when her voice cracks.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“This never happened,” Jane says. She pulls on her panties and her sweatpants clumsily and pushes her hair out of her face to look at him. She stands there topless beside the bed, Reg already reclining against his pillows, his clothes back in place.   
  
“Never,” he echoes with a smirk, but his eyes keep drifting back down to her tits.  
  
She pulls her t-shirt on quickly. “Never,” she repeats and points at him.   
  
“Never,” he says again, resigned irritation creeping in, his hands held up as though in mock surrender.  
  
“Good,” she says. She says, “We’re on the same page then,” and Reg looks at like he wants to laugh at her and throw her out of his hotel room all at once. Perhaps at the same time.   
  
When she’s at the door he calls to her from the bed.  
  
“We’re on the road at eight A.M. sharp tomorrow,” he says, his usual blend of smug authority returning to his voice.  
  
“Aye, aye, captain.” She salutes as she opens the door.  
  
“I mean it, Miss Daisy. This chauffeur is leaving without your sorry ass tomorrow if you’re not down in that lobby by eight A.M.”  
  
She salutes him again, this time with one finger and a smirk. Reg rolls his eyes.  
  
“Good night,” she calls as she lets the door slam shut.  
  
Jane shuffles back down to the hall to her own hotel room. She’s still wet between her legs, but wet with the both of them, and during this entire time -- the walk from her room to his, Reg fucking her, this walk back -- she does not once think of Matt.  
  
Matt does not figure here.  
  
She will not think of Matt until the morning, until she is in the car with Reg and they are headed back to the city. When she thinks of Matt then she will be unable to decide if the guilt she feels is more associated with what she has done or the mere fact that she had not thought of him until then.  
  
There is a difference there, she thinks. She just is unsure how to tease it out. She is unsure what it says about her.   
  
Nothing good, she thinks. She’d bet it all that it says nothing good about her. Not at all.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _T H R E E ;_**  
  
  
  
  
They fight the entire way back into the city.   
  
They fight about the proper use of the turn signal, about Reg’s inability to brake properly (“You’re going to give me whiplash, Jesus, Reg; you see the brake lights in front of you? You start braking too”), about Jane’s taste in talk radio (“You the driver, you get to pick the station. I’m the driver, and like hell I’m picking NP-fucking-R”), when and where to stop for gas, when and where to stop for a meal, how much additional time expected construction work on the freeway is going to add to their journey, and whether real men drink martinis.  
  
“James Bond did,” she says for the third time. It’s her main argument. Reg inches the car forward and then brakes again. Jane slouches a little lower in the passenger seat; it’s bumper-to-bumper far as the eye can see, and she doesn’t think she cares to see anymore.  
  
“James Bond’s not a real man. He’s fictional,” Reg says. She rolls her eyes.  
  
“What do real men drink then?” she asks in a faux macho voice with a heavy New York accent. “Rubbing alcohol, gasoline, Guinness on tap.”  
  
“That what you serve in your dad’s bar, huh?”  
  
“Mmhmm, yes. The rubbing alcohol and gasoline are big hits among the real men. The dandies order martinis.”  
  
“My point exactly,” he says, and they inch forward some more.   
  
“I was mocking you.”  
  
“And I’m choosing to ignore that.”  
  
They reach the city by nightfall. By the time they reach the city they are not even arguing anymore. The car is silent, the both of them absorbed in their own thoughts.  
  
“Want me to drop you?” he asks her, and she looks at him, confused and borderline alarmed. Last night never happened. It never happened. They agreed to that. They were on the same page.  
  
“Well, yeah. Where else you think I’m going.”  
  
“Smart aleck,” he mutters under his breath. He says louder, “I gotta return the car at the station and didn’t know if you wanted to, I don’t know, go see Sweeney or something.”  
  
“Oh,” she says, slightly chastened. “I can see Sweeney in the morning.” She yawns. “If you could drop me,” she says slowly, “that’d be great.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When she gets to work the next morning, the entire squad has already heard about their backwoods adventure in upstate New York.  
  
“Goddamn,” Augie says, his feet propped up on Lou’s desk (“Those better be clean, buddy,” Lou said when Augie kicked them up on top of Lou’s copy of the  _Wall Street Journal_ ; “oh please,” Augie said, “like you actually read the  _Wall Street Journal_.” “I read it,” Lou countered, to which Augie goaded, “oh yeah? Explain it to me, man. Explain the market system to a simple man such as myself. Tell me about the housing market crash. Talk to me, Alan Greenspan. Oh my god, subprime mortgages, give it to me good, Lou”).   
  
“You two leave the city for a day,” he says to Jane, Reg ignoring the conversation at his own desk, “and get to participate in a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral while what do we do? We sit around waiting for a freaking phone call like an ugly chick on prom night. That’s so not fair. That’s the opposite of fair.”  
  
Neither Jane nor Reg ever say anything to the contrary. They let Augie go on thinking that he got the raw end of that deal. They let him think that what happened upstate was the fun Clint Eastwood fodder Augie imagines that it was.   
  
Neither says: no Augie it was terrible it was awful my hands wouldn’t stop shaking I thought we were dead I thought we both were dead.  
  
I thought we both were dead so we fucked each other that same night.  
  
There’s no place for a confession like that, least of all with Blando, but maybe even more so with themselves.   
  
It’s not until she is typing out her report at almost two in the morning that she actually gets it.   
  
She types:  _Detective Reg Duffy shot and killed armed gunman Mark Morgan after attempts were made on witness Amanda Patterson’s and my own life. Detective Duffy shot and killed Morgan while Morgan shot at me as I reloaded my own service weapon._  
  
What she gets, what she knows she’s going to have to say at the grand jury inquiry, is that Reg saved her life. The first man he ever killed was in her defense.   
  
She does not write that part.   
  
She does not write about the after either.  
  
The hotel room, that bottle of bourbon, her mouth on his mouth, his body on top of, inside of, hers.  
  
That, after all, never happened.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane works a domestic violence case gone wrong (“Wronger, more wrong,” she says to Sweeney when he calls the case that, like domestic violence itself isn’t already something terribly, terribly wrong) with Evrard, and for a good week, she throws herself into that. She skirts wide of Reg, and he seems to do the same with her. She knows he’s working some gang-related case, some sort of hit tied to the Latin Kings or Spanish Mafia or something. Lou’s working it with him, and Augie had explained the case to her (whether she wanted to hear about it or not) the other morning over bagels.  
  
“Lou loves those gang cases. I think he likes to think that he’ll get to go undercover with the Kings or something. That idiot,” Augie told her.   
  
“You do a lot of work with the Kings when you guys worked narco?” she asked him. Augie’s mouth twisted in a rueful grin and he laughed with his mouth full.  
  
“Yeah, sure.” He laughed again, and Jane just gaped blankly at him.  
  
“What’s the punchline, Blando?”  
  
“Ah, nothing, Janey. Good times, is all. Narco was a fucking blast, man.” He held his hand over his heart dramatically. “I miss it so!”  
  
A good week passes before she finds herself alone with Reg.   
  
 They are in the breakroom together. It’s morning, her case closed, and his nearing an end.  
  
He is in the breakroom and he is fixing himself a cup of coffee. Jane stands in the doorway.  
  
For just a beat, it is entirely unbearable.   
  
Reg looks at Jane as though she just caught him red-handed, and Jane freezes. She lingers in the doorway for a second too long to seem natural. It makes her feel stupid. He makes her feel stupid, and that in turn makes her feel angry.   
  
She brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear and steps into the breakroom and pours herself a cup of coffee.  
  
“You believe Halloween’s in two weeks?” she says idly as she stirs in some milk.  
  
Reg grimaces.  
  
“Fucking Halloween,” is all he says, but it’s enough.  
  
Jane laughs to herself when he leaves the breakroom.  
  
“Business as usual,” she mutters under her breath.  
  
Business as usual.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _F O U R ;_**  
  
  
  
  
It’s late October when Sweeney pairs Reg and Jane up again. It’s a seemingly cut and dry homicide case -- a drive-by shooting most likely tied to the drug trade, but narco has punted the grunt work their way.  
  
It’s the second day of the case when Reg and Jane get a tip-off from a go-to in-house informant about a storage locker the deceased kept down near Chinatown.  
  
In a way, this is another thing that Jane should have seen coming:  
  
When they get to the storage locker, they’re ambushed.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The storage locker is empty. There’s nothing inside the unit the deceased had rented, and Jane frowns as she stands in the center of the locker, as she casts her flashlight over the walls.   
  
“So what’s this about you think?” she asks Reg.  
  
It’s when he turns to face her that the first shot is fired. There is a single beat where she cannot see his face. A single moment where Reg is all shadows and outlines -- the bank of windows behind him bright and blue with the lights shining in the parking lot at his back, Reg nothing more than a silhouette.   
  
The first window shatters when the first shot hits it.   
  
Jane and Reg move quickly, in unison, and duck at the same time.   
  
Reg shuts his flashlight off, and the only light is from the bullet holes pockmarking the wall, the bright lights from the parking lot shining through.  
  
Together, they try to creep out of the storage locker. When she manages a peek out one of the shot-out windows, she can see that the shooters are firing from a car parked across the parking lot. Between the locker and the shooters is Reg’s car.   
  
“Your car,” she hisses at Reg.  
  
He looks at her, breathing hard. “You think we make it?” he asks.  
  
“What’s the alternative?” She cocks her own gun and Reg grips his own that much tighter.   
  
He nods then, his body lunged low, ready to move fast for his car.  
  
“Nothing stupid?” he says, hushed, over his shoulder.  
  
Jane smiles grimly. “Never,” she repeats.  
  
She imagines the words to be a talisman. She imagines that lightning can strike twice. That they are the exception to the rule. That his car is not that far. That this, what they are doing, what they are doing again -- the broken windows and the bullet holes, the dark night, her heart in her throat, her palms sweating against the grip of her gun -- will end the same as the first time.  
  
She imagines it wrong.  
  
They are met with a hail of bullets behind his car. His car is shot up, the windows explode, and they both cover themselves beneath the shower of broken glass, the threat of bullets.   
  
 _Nothing stupid_ , he said.   
  
It hits her at the same time that first one and then another bullet hits her in the side that Reg had said it wrong.  
  
Back in that motel room, the two of them crowded back in the bathroom, he had said to her:  
  
“Don’t be stupid.”  
  
He said it wrong, she thinks, and the superstition cannot hold.  
  
Her palms sweat against the grip of her gun, and she bleeds out beneath her winter coat.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The first thing she finds she feels is annoyance. She doesn’t have the time for this. She can still hear the patter and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, and she knows she has at least a round left in the chamber. She had been counting.  
  
The second thing she feels is complete and overriding pain, coupled with abstract terror. She feels that she should be afraid, but strangely, she’s not. The shots themselves had knocked her down to first her knees and then all fours. She should have worn a vest. Why hadn’t she worn a vest. Her elbows are shaking, but she is still holding herself up on her hands, her gun still clutched white-knuckle tight, and she can feel it -- her entire torso is soaked.   
  
All of this happens in a handful of seconds, but it feels as though it drags for hours. She feels lightheaded, sick, everything fucking  _hurts_. When she hears herself gasp, the sound as loud as the shots firing around her, she hears Reg.  
  
“Jane? Jane? No no no, Jane? Jane? No, goddamnit, Jane?  _Jane_  -- ”  
  
He wraps his arm around her waist, and she whimpers, the sound so small, and he lowers her onto her back. There’s broken glass everywhere, pebbles of it from his shattered car windows, and it crunches under his knees, her hands, his hands, his hands pressing against her abdomen, sticky and dark with her blood, and he’s cursing under his breath again, but there is no edge of panic to his voice or words -- or if there is, she cannot detect it.   
  
Listening to him, she realizes the night has gone quiet. The only sound is them, the idling of a car engine, the distant hum of traffic -- nothing more. Reg notices it too and he raises his head slightly, tries to look over the hood of his car.   
  
“Keep your hands on it. Jane, keep your hands, yeah, press down,” he says, fast and quiet, as he presses her own hands over the two wounds. “Hold it there, hold it, just for -- ”  
  
He moves quickly away from her and she can hear tires squealing in the distance, and when Reg returns, crouches down beside her, he’s muttering under his breath, “W . . . E . . . K . . . T . . . twenty-nine.” He repeats it again and again, he presses his hand over hers, and she gets it around the third time he repeats the sequence: he was memorizing the license plate.  
  
“Smart,” she murmurs, but Reg doesn’t catch it. He’s shouldering off his coat and folding it, putting it over her wounds and applying pressure. He’s got his phone at his ear, and it’s hard to focus on him, focus on what he’s saying.  
  
“ . . . we got an officer down, I repeat, an officer down, we need a bus out here, stat, we’re down at . . . ”  
  
She lets her eyelids flutter shut for what she thinks is only a minute, but then Reg is shaking her awake.  
  
“Hey, hey, hey, come on, Jane, come on. I need you to stay with me, alright? Keep your eyes open, that’s it, keep ‘em open, a bus is on its way, we’re good, you’re good.”  
  
Her blood has managed to seep through his wool coat, and she knows that is not good. She knows that is the opposite of something good, and she can tell that Reg knows it too.  
  
“I’m gonna, I’m just gonna get a look here, okay?” he says to her. He lifts her slightly to get a look at her back, and the movement makes Jane start coughing.   
  
“Looks like,” he says as he settles her back down, puts pressure against her again, “looks like they’re both through-and-throughs. That’s good,” he says. “That’s real good, Jane.”  
  
“Did you find the bullets?” she asks. Her voice sounds so strange to her. Far away and slightly garbled, and Reg is looking at her so seriously. He’s looking at her like she’s far away and lost already and it’s that, strangely enough, that strikes real fear in her for the first time since she was shot.  
  
“Why,” Reg asks, the casual tone to his voice completely forced, “you wanna wear them on a chain around your neck?”  
  
“Yes,” she says, “along with the teeth and the ears of my enemies.” She smiles, and she is sure it must look gruesome and macabre. She can taste the blood in her mouth; she imagines it has stained her teeth red.  
  
Reg doesn’t say anything, but he tries to smile. He averts his gaze to the parking lot suddenly, looking for that ambulance they were promised.   
  
She wants to tell him that she’s fine, that she doesn’t die here -- that things can’t work that way. She needs to tell him that she isn’t going to die. But when she opens her mouth the only thing that spills out is her own blood and, curiously, his name. The sound sticks in the back of her throat, sticks with all that blood (so much blood; it’s all in her mouth and pooled around her on the pavement, black in the lack of light; it’s painted over Reg, his own chest as black and red as her own even though she’s the one with the wounds, the one with the hurt), but he must hear her. He must hear his name, because his head jerks back to her, he looks down at her instead of out over the hood of his car.   
  
He says to her, “Yeah.” He says it over and over again, hushed and almost earnest. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jane, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Jane. Yeah -- ”  
  
Her says her name, too.  
  
Her cradles her head in his lap.  
  
If Jane was a different person and knew how to observe herself and not just the patterns of others, if this was a different scenario (if the blood on the pavement wasn’t her own), if we were to change everything except the way these two people say each other’s names, one truth would still stand: the names serve as placeholders.   
  
The names are the second option, the first too unwieldy, too terrifying to get a firm grip on, to control. They say these names instead of all the other things they feel, that they fear, about the other. They say the names, no conscious cognitive activity behind it, no deliberation, just a name -- a single syllable. And perhaps it is less a question of bravery, but rather understanding what any of that, all of that, might mean. To him. To her.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He rides with her in the ambulance to the hospital. She remembers him holding her hand, both their hands sticky and caked with her blood. She remembers his voice.  
  
His voice is the last thing she can remember.  
  
“Come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on -- ” he says.  
  
He says, “ _Jane_.”  
  
He won’t stop saying her name.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
(She doesn’t die here.  
  
She was right on that count  
  
She does not die here).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _F I V E ;_**  
  
  
  
  
She’s been staying with her father.   
  
She’s doing a lot better. She can get out of bed on her own, dress herself, shower. Baby steps, her father keeps saying. Oona is around a lot to help. She hadn’t known at first how to explain to Matt why she thought it best she stay at her father’s instead of their apartment. She told him she did not want him having to take time off of work. She told him that she didn’t want him as a wet nurse, that she would by far be the worst patient ever, and besides: Oona was out of work. Oona needed something to do. Oona fucking owed her.   
  
She did not try to explain the rest to him, the true reasoning behind it all. She could not say to him that she hated the way he looked at her now. That she did not want his pity or his sympathy. That she did not want to hear him bring up the subject of her job one more time. That was all too much for her. He was too much for her right now, and there was no kind or gentle or understanding way to make that point known.   
  
Jane had spent a week at the hospital. Matt had been in and out the entire time, bitching about the visiting hours and power-tripping nurses on staff (his words), and Jane had felt what limited patience she had stowed away inside her wane rapidly.  
  
When she had awakened the second day in the hospital, Matt had not been there. When she woke that second day, she felt clear-headed, or as clear-headed as she imagines she was likely to be given everything.  
  
Her father had been sitting there beside her bed, half-awake when she finally opened her eyes. She had startled him half to death when she said, “Dad, come on, you’re gonna give yourself a crick in your neck if you sleep like that,” her voice scratchy and unused.  
  
Her father had been the one to fill her in on everything.  
  
“Matt had to run home, check on his wee boy,” he said to her.  
  
Jane had tried to nod, but found that even that small movement hurt too much.  
  
“I can give Sweeney a call for you, if you like. I know those boys would want to know you’re awake and doing well.”  
  
Her father told her that her squad had been at the hospital for most of the night she had been in surgery.  
  
He told her that that Detective Duffy had stayed for the better part of eighteen hours -- from the time they wheeled her in to first the hospital and then into surgery until the time she finally woke up after they stitched her up good.  
  
“You don’t remember seeing him?” her father asked. “Aye, then, you were pretty doped up, Janey,” he laughed. She hadn’t said anything, and her father smiled fondly at her.  
  
“I thought you said the man hated you,” he said.  
  
Jane was too tired to argue, so she didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t say anything about any of that.  
  
She had thought that she had awakened clear-headed, but her thoughts felt too muddy, and what her father was saying, what he was telling her, only thickened them all the more.  
  
She didn’t know what to do with that.  
  
So she ignored it.  
  
Once the hospital allowed for her release, she went straight to her father’s house, straight to her old bedroom.   
  
It’s been two weeks now, and she was restless three days into her stay.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She gets a call from Lou one afternoon. She’s in her father’s kitchen, washing the dishes from breakfast when her phone rings.  
  
“We got the guy,” he says.   
  
“You got him? What, he down at the station? You got him in custody?”  
  
“In the ground more like,” Lou says to her. Jane’s body stills against the sink. She lets her hands float on top of the dirty dishwater. She doesn’t need him to say the rest. She doesn’t need him to. She knows. She knows exactly what he is going to say next.  
  
He says it anyway.  
  
“Reg capped him.” Lou says it lightly, almost proudly, no judgment. “Guy reached for his piece, and  _bang_. Duffy shot him clean in the head.” In the background she can hear Augie crowing over something. Probably the same thing Lou is telling her; she thinks she hears Augie shout  _bang!_  and then laugh uproariously.   
  
 _That’s two_ , she thinks. Twenty years on the job, and the two kills he’s earned to his name have been in hers.   
  
After she hangs up, she calls Reg. It goes straight to voicemail.  
  
“It’s Jane. Call me.”  
  
He doesn’t call her.  
  
He shows up at her father’s house instead.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Your pop’s got a real nice place,” he says to her. She shuts the front door behind him.   
  
“Yeah,” she says, pulling the single word long and flat, tight. They just stand there for a beat, right next to the front door -- Jane looking up at him, Reg with his hands jammed into his coat pocket.   
  
“You wanna come in?” She doesn’t wait for an answer and turns on her heel, heads for the kitchen calling over her shoulder, “We still got some coffee. Not too bad.”  
  
She still walks brusquely, but slower than she used to walk. Reg follows her into the kitchen, and Jane can feel herself getting angry, anxious.  
  
“I’ll take you up on that cup,” he says to her, and Jane nods. She fills a mug quickly, splashing some coffee onto the countertop she leaves to wipe up later, and hands off the mug without looking Reg in the eye.   
  
She doesn’t even bother to ask if he wants milk. She just opens the fridge and then leaves the milk on the counter next to the sugar. Reg scoops a spoonful of sugar into his coffee, but he doesn’t add any of the milk. There’s a break in the pattern then, she thinks, because how many mornings -- how many nights and dull afternoons for that matter -- have the two of them fought over the same carton of milk or the last clean spoon?  
  
Jane fills a glass of water for herself at the sink, sneaking a glance at Reg, who is sneaking a glance at her. His mouth twists into a closed-mouth grin as he turns away and takes a first sip of the coffee she poured him. That same angry anxiety she felt when she let him into her father’s house reasserts itself. She turns the tap off and takes a long pull from the glass.   
  
It’s just that Reg seems too big for this house. It’s just that his presence here feels too much, too intimate, too  _something_  she is terribly afraid of broaching. He dominates the kitchen, tall, still in that long dark wool coat (a new one, she thinks, I ruined the last one), doing something so natural as drinking a cup of coffee she brewed earlier that morning.   
  
She turns to face him when he clears his throat.  
  
“You look good,” he finally says, and Jane bites the inside of her cheek.   
  
“I’m doing good,” she parries back. “Doc says I should be able to return to work in about a week.”  
  
Reg nods. “Desk duty?” he asks.  
  
Jane shrugs, a self-deprecating expression on her face. “I’m sure. No way’s Sweeney letting me back in the field just yet. And besides, I have about a dozen psych eval minefields to work my way through first.”  
  
“Enjoy,” he says drily.   
  
He clears his throat again.   
  
They only talk shop. They talk about the job. They talk about the things they themselves are a part of but that are not necessarily a part of them. For instance: he does not tell her about shooting the man who shot her. For example: she does not tell him about Matt and how he finds it hard to look at her now, how he barely touches her, how he is almost afraid of her and all that comes with her. How sometimes she doesn’t blame him.  
  
The conversation stalls out after twenty minutes.  
  
She looks down at the glass in her hand. She doesn’t know what to say to him. They stand there in tense silence together, the only sound the loud, almost ominous ticking of the grandfather clock in the next room.  
  
Standing there in front of him, she finds she wants him to touch her. It’s such a bizarre urge -- to want to lean into him, to touch him first, to simply grab him by the wrist and make him press his hand against her again. She finds herself thinking about it, about him, his hands, a lot. She can remember what they felt like pressed firm against her body, first in that hotel room and then second, when he tried to stop her from bleeding out in that parking lot, when he cradled her head, smeared her own blood all over her neck as he held her. She shouldn’t want that again.   
  
She shouldn’t want him to touch her, but she does.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She does not touch him.  
  
He does not touch her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
At the front door, she finally says it.  
  
“Lou told me,” she says.   
  
“Figured as much. Figured that’s why you called.” His eyes crinkle a little as he smiles ruefully. “Subtle’s never been your strong suit, Skip.”  
  
She doesn’t know how to say thank you and she certainly doesn’t know how to say she’s sorry, doesn’t even know if what she is feeling is close to an apology, so she doesn’t say anything at all. But she looks at his mouth, and maybe it’s all the time she’s been stuck in bed, all the time she’s been coddled and nursed, but she’s feeling reckless. She’s feeling reckless and she wants his mouth against her own, she wants him against her, his weight on top of her again.   
  
He leaves, and they do not touch.  
  
 They do not touch, not once.   
  
Not even when she handed him that coffee mug in her father’s kitchen, not even then.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _S I X ;_**  
  
  
  
  
She returns to work two weeks before Thanksgiving. Her first day back she’s met with a mountain of files and Augie’s boyish grin.  
  
“I was gonna buy you a card, but these old boys allow me to express myself so, so,  _so_  much better. With love, Janey!” he calls to her. “With love!”  
  
She meets with the shrink, Dr. Stevens, for the first time that day, too.  
  
It’s a different doc than she had to see after the upstate shoot-out. This doctor is also a woman, but thin-lipped and tired looking.   
  
“How are we doing?” the doctor asks Jane, and Jane instantly dislikes her, if only for the collective we.  
  
“ _We_ ,” Jane mocks, “are doing just fine.”  
  
“Are you angry to be back?” Dr. Stevens asks.  
  
Jane shakes her head. “Quite the contrary. I’m happy to be back,” she says, and she means it.   
  
“Are you angry to be here?”  
  
Jane shrugs. “I find it unnecessary,” she says flatly. “What happened to me? It happens.” She swallows. “I always knew this was part of the job. That this, this  _risk_  was associated. It sucks,” she shrugs again, “but I knew the risk.”  
  
Things fall apart, she doesn’t say.  
  
Collateral damage.   
  
Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When Jane is finally allowed in the field again, it’s a dead girl case she’s working with Reg. The girl -- driver’s license pins her age at nineteen -- was strangled, the ligature marks stark against her skin, her hair a natural dirty blonde.  
  
There is no weapon at the scene. No sign of a struggle. What there is, however, is a crudely painted crucifix on the wall above the body in black paint.  
  
(The scene is her dorm room at NYU. Her roommate had gone to Jersey for the weekend to visit with family. When she returned, she found her roommate, and she found the painted cross).   
  
“You sure you want this case?” Sweeney asks her when Reg and Jane return to the station. She has already thrown back half of the whiskey he poured in her glass, and she glares at him over the rim.  
  
“Don’t patronize me. Don’t feel like you need to coddle me. Believe me, I am getting that enough in every other facet of my life right now, okay.”  
  
Sweeney sighs, polishes off his glass of whiskey and sets the empty glass down on his desk.   
  
“This isn’t going to be pretty, Jane.”  
  
She gets what he’s saying. Jane echoes his sigh and finishes her drink.  
  
The scene alone at the dorm had all the trappings of a serial killing. The arrangement and precise display of the body. The crucifix on the wall. The neat killing, the lack of evidence.   
  
Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows Sweeney has a point.   
  
When this is over, she thinks, she will be able to say she knew the risk.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _S E V E N ;_**  
  
  
  
  
The one tip Jane and Reg have for this case comes from the dorm building’s janitor. According to him, he saw someone the night this girl was killed. He saw someone, a someone who he claims knows a guy, who knows a guy, who in turn knows a guy, who knows the janitor.  
  
“God, I’m getting too old for shit like this,” Jane grumbles as she slams the passenger side door and settles into the seat.  
  
“Think of it as a day off,” Reg says as he readjusts the rearview mirror. “We get paid to sit in a parking lot all day, waiting for some guy to come stumbling down an alley.”  
  
“That was a shit tip-off, and you know it,” she grouses to him.  
  
“‘course I know it,” he says. “But what the fuck else we got to go off though, huh?”  
  
He starts the car.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They have been sitting in the rundown parking lot (the $7/hour pay-to-park sign at the entrance to the lot adds a specific insult to injury, Jane finds) a few blocks from the girl’s dorm building for only an hour, and Jane is already bored.   
  
“I should have grabbed us a couple 40’s back at the gas station,” she mumbles around a strand of licorice.   
  
“Couple 40’s,” he repeats, doubtful. “Shoulda made it an entire 24-pack.”  
  
“Where you think that figures in, you know. The policeman’s handbook. Code of conduct.”  
  
Reg is quiet for a beat, and then does that thing where he smiles, but he also grimaces.  
  
“I think it don’t figure in, so long as you don’t go getting caught.”  
  
“A detective who thinks like a criminal,” she says, waggling the half eaten strand of licorice in his direction. “I like that.”  
  
“You keep eating that shit your teeth are just gonna rot straight out of your head.”  
  
Jane takes a savage bite of the licorice rope.  
  
“You’re eating beef jerky, man. Like you have the nutritional high ground here, come on.”  
  
“Ah, I’m not talking nutrition. I’m talking dentistry.” He points at her. “Whole other kettle of fish.”  
  
Jane turns to Reg suddenly when she hears the click of a lighter.  
  
“You light that cigar, I swear to god, Duffy, I will jam it down your throat. Or I will light you on fire. Or both, maybe -- at the same time.”  
  
Duffy raises his eyebrows as he smirks at her.  
  
“I’m beginning to think you might want to take it under advisement to pick up smoking again.” Reg snaps the lighter shut, and, surprisingly, puts the cigar back in his jacket pocket. “Way I see it, you couldn’t have been less tolerable when you were keeping time with the Marlboro Man.”  
  
“How’d you know I used to smoke Marlboros?” she asks.  
  
“Lucky guess,” he drawls.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Why is it,” she asks after the sun has set and after her stomach feels like a giant knot of congealing sugar and red dye #40, “that Sweeney feels the need to keep putting us on assignments where a major portion of the task requires we spend long periods of time isolated together in a car?”  
  
“Think it’s his idea of a joke.”  
  
“His sense of humor can suck it.”  
  
“Yeah? You tell him that? Pretty sure a month from now you and I’ll be investigating the world’s most boring killing that somehow requires us to spend days at a time on a goddamn fishing boat headed north for Canada.”  
  
“That’s entirely too specific, Reg. You been thinking about this? Plotting out case scenarios for you and I to enjoy?”  
  
“I like to be aware of all possible worst case scenarios.”  
  
“Spending time with me on a Canadian-bound fishing boat is a worst case scenario?”  
  
“Yeah,” he says after a beat, “Yeah, I’d say it could rank on up there.”  
  
Jane is quiet for a few minutes. Instead of saying, yeah you might have a point there, she says, “The ocean makes me nervous.”  
  
“The smell of raw fish makes me nauseous,” Reg says.  
  
“I saw a thing on the TV once about the Bermuda Triangle, and I don’t care what anyone says, that shit is real. The ocean is powerful. I respect it, man. And I am totally afraid of it.”  
  
“I never got the sushi craze,” Reg says, the two of them having separate conversations aimed at the other. “Who wants raw fish rolled up in some rice? I guarantee you, few years from now, everyone’s going to be mad with mercury poisoning or something.”  
  
“I bet your little speculative Canadian boat killing? Probably totally involved prescription drug smuggling.”  
  
“We do have a knack for those cases,” Reg says.  
  
“Probably a shoot-out, knowing us.”  
  
Reg is quiet for a minute, the patter they’ve established dissolved, the atmosphere suddenly tense. “We joking about that now?” he asks archly.  
  
It surprises Jane. She cocks her head towards him, but he’s watching the alley, not her. It reminds her of Oona. It reminds her of Oona yelling at her back when Jane was staying with their father. Oona had yelled at her one night, told her that she needed to go easier on Matt.  
  
“We get it, Janey. The Bionic Woman. Indestructible. You think you’re fine now and you thought you were fine then. We get it. But what you don’t seem to get is that we didn’t think that a couple weeks ago. We thought you were gone, Jane. And you should be fucking tickled that so many people give a shit and are having a hard time assuming business as usual with you.”  
  
It’s sort of like that, she thinks. Which, if it is sort of like that, then that means Reg sort of gives a shit.   
  
“Yeah,” she says, tries to shrug it off.   
  
“Yeah,” Reg repeats, a quieter echo of her. They sit there quietly, both watching the alley, and Jane bites down on the toothpick hanging out of her mouth.  
  
“God, Sweeney would be such a dick to assign us that case,” she says.  
  
Reg snorts beside her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
About an hour later, her cell phone rings.  
  
The display reads MATT, and,  _fuck_.  
  
She was supposed to meet Matt and his ex-wife Tricia (and her new husband) uptown that night for dinner. Jane stares down at the screen and curses under her breath. “Aw, shit,” she says, “aw, shit, shit, shit.”  
  
“What?” Reg asks.  
  
“Nothing,” she mumbles. “Goddamnit . . . Babe!” she says into the phone. “Babe, I am so sorry. I am so, so, so sorry.”  
  
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice even, and that somehow makes it worse.  
  
“I’m -- I’m working. I completely forgot to call you. I’m on a stakeout. Of all fucking things, right?” She laughs nervously. “I forgot. I forgot about dinner, and because I forgot about dinner I forgot to give you a call.”  
  
Matt doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Jane stares intently out the passenger window, refusing to acknowledge the reflection of Reg’s profile she can see in the glass.  
  
“Jane,” Matt says, his voice still even, “I don’t ask much of you. You know that. You  _know_  that. But every now and again I merely ask that you show up.”  
  
“And I do. I do show up. When I can. And tonight? I can’t.”  
  
“What am I supposed to tell Tricia, huh?”  
  
“What you tell Tricia does not concern me.” Jane can feel her own patience start to splinter. “When did your ex-wife become my responsibility,” she says plainly. “Tell her whatever. Tell her I’m the worst. That I’m a flake. Tell her I have a fucking job to do and sometimes that might interfere with her delicate dinner party scheduling. I know: tell her I got shot. That always seems to shut her up.”  
  
“Jane . . . ”  
  
“You know it’s true. Every time you mention it, which is a lot, she clams right up. Tell her I got shot and now I’m at a stakeout. I am just  _that_  important and busy.”  
  
“You know what? Jesus, Janey. God, fucking . . . ” he trails off. “You make it so goddamn difficult to love you, you know that? I swear to god.”  
  
“Okay,” she sighs. “Okay, I’m calling a timeout. Timeout until I get home tonight and then we can resume this.”  
  
“When you get home? Sure. Sure, I’ll be asleep, and you’ll sneak in, and you won’t wake me, and we’ll shelve this conversation until you fuck up again and I call you on it.”  
  
“You’re starting to get mean, and say things I don’t think you entirely want to be saying, so, uh, let’s just put this on hold for now.”  
  
“You really think I don’t mean these things, Janey? You really think you’re the easiest woman to love?”  
  
“I’m going, Matt. Send Tricia my best.”  
  
She sits there in silence after she hangs up, and then mutters, “Shut up.”  
  
“Didn’t say nothing,” Reg says.  
  
“I can hear you. I can hear you thinking. And judging. And mocking me,” she says. She sighs heavily.  
  
“Ah, go easy on the guy. Ex-wives are tricky.”  
  
She turns to face him. “What, is there some sort of league of divorced men where you all have to defend each other against the evil tribe of invading women?”  
  
“To be fair, based on my eavesdropping, you did leave him in a bit of a lurch.”  
  
“God, shut up, Duffy,” she snaps. He laughs.  
  
“You really siding with him?” she asks him. He shrugs.  
  
“Don’t really see any other choice,” he says.   
  
Jane frowns. “What the hell does that mean?”  
  
“Means it wouldn’t look right if I agreed with you on this count.”  
  
It’s all he says, and Jane just stares at him. It hits her suddenly what he means. It hits her just as suddenly that this is the first time the two of them have come close to talking about what happened at that awful Holiday Inn upstate.  
  
He means that he’s the man she slept with behind her boyfriend’s back.  
  
He means he doesn’t want to force a wedge between them. He doesn’t want to be that wedge.   
  
Jane slouches low in her seat. She decides to twist this into something innocuous -- an easier pill to swallow.  
  
“So you’re saying there is a league?” she teases, and Reg rolls his eyes.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _E I G H T ;_**  
  
  
  
  
The stakeout -- unsurprisingly -- is a bust.  
  
The rest of November is spent by Jane and Reg hitting nothing but dead-ends. They cannot unearth a single clue, they cannot find a single suspect.  
  
 They cannot build a goddamn case.  
  
Jane spends Thanksgiving with her father and her sister that year. Things with Matt have been tentative and shaky since the night she stood him up for dinner, and when he suggests that he go to Tricia’s alone so he can spend the holiday with his son, Jane does not object. She eats early with her father and her sister, and she stays at her father’s bar that night, helping to serve drinks to the regulars.  
  
Snow comes the first weekend in December, and along with it, another body, another crucifix. Another blonde.  
  
Jane and Matt never did have that conversation -- that night, or any other.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The crime scene is the same as the first, the only difference the location.  
  
The only difference the identity of the victim.  
  
The second victim was a nurse at New York Presbyterian -- twenty-three years old, blonde, lived alone, her boyfriend found the body.  
  
The scene is swarming with news media and nosy neighbors when Reg and Jane arrive. They find nothing of note at the scene.  
  
“What about the paint, huh?” Jane suggests. “You think we might find something with that?”  
  
“What, the address for the nearest Home Depot?” Reg snaps.   
  
When they return to the station, Sweeney chews them out.  
  
“I don’t care what they are, I don’t care how I get them. What I need is something.  _Anything_  at this point,” he tells them.   
  
Jane and Reg work through dinner. They comb through the compiled case files -- meager as they are -- and they retrace the interviews conducted with potential witnesses, with friends, family. They try to find connections between the two victims. Jane keeps going back to that crucifix.  
  
It’s approaching midnight when she finally stands and stretches. Reg looks up at her from his desk, dark circles under his eyes, his shirtsleeves rolled and wrinkled.   
  
She stops in the bathroom, splashes some water onto her face before heading down to her makeshift bunk to grab a couple hours of sleep.  
  
She has just settled in with a blanket when the door opens.  
  
“Thought I’d find you here,” Reg says.  
  
“Can I help you?” she asks, her tone imperious even when it stretches into an open-mouthed yawn.  
  
 Reg exhales loudly. “Yeah, Jane. Yeah, you can help me. You can help me with this case. Let’s start there.”  
  
Jane’s eyes narrow and she kicks the blanket off of her. She stands up slowly and Reg shuts the door behind him.   
  
“This about Sweeney being pissed at us? That it? Gotta keep up appearances for the boss? Or are you just tired? Are you tired too? Because here’s the thing, Reg: I am not a magician and I can’t make evidence appear out of nowhere. And here’s another thing: I am so goddamned tired right now I can’t even see straight. So making something out of nothing? Really not likely to happen right now.”  
  
“You need your rest,” he says condescendingly. Jane laughs mirthlessly.   
  
“You asshole,” she says, and she takes a step forward.   
  
 _You need your rest_. The words settle inside of her, and she finds herself furious. Out of everyone after she was shot, every single fucking person she knew, Reg had been the only one not to treat her any differently. The difference between them, that weird yawning gap between the both of them, could be chalked up to the case upstate. It could be chalked up to that hotel room, to the fact she wanted him and he wanted her so she let him force his way inside her, force herself around him.  
  
It wasn’t because she took two bullets. It wasn’t because he saw her as fragile, fallible, something to be broken.  
  
With him, she thought, she had thought, it was the opposite of that.  
  
It’s why he pushed her: because she could take it.  
  
 _You need your rest._  
  
“What? You think I shouldn’t be here?” she spits out at him. “That I shouldn’t be back on the job yet? Oh, poor, Jane. Poor little Jane needs her rest. You fucking asshole.”  
  
Reg steps away from the door and towards her.  
  
He all but shouts back at her. “You think that’s what I think? You really think that’s my problem?”   
  
“Of course I do! It’s what everyone thinks!” Reg looks at her disbelieving, so Jane steps closer, her index finger jabbing him in the center of his chest. “No? Huh? No? Then tell me. Illuminate it for me, Reg -- what the fuck is your problem with me?”   
  
“Everything,” he seethes. “Every-fucking-thing, Jane. Everything.”   
  
She gets up in his face, her exhaustion supplemented by overwhelming and complete frustration. “Oh, and like you’re such a prince. Charming, easy-going Reg Duffy. Except for how you are just the total and complete opposite of that. Except for how you are a royal pain in my ass this fucking department forces me to endure.”   
  
“‘Forces you to endure,’ listen to you,” he mocks. She glares at him. “Was it Sweeney who forced you into my hotel room? The department that instructed you get in my bed? Who was it who told you to spread your legs, huh?” His voice has dropped low, his pulse up, she can see it thumping in his neck, and his words hit her like a fist to the gut.   
  
“Fuck you,” she breathes, and she doesn’t know when their bodies got so close to one another.   
  
“Yeah, fuck you,” he echoes, even quieter.   
  
And then he is grabbing her by the jaw, his hands cupping her face, and he is kissing her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s not like before. There is no comfort here, only cruelty.   
  
The second time they fuck is against the wall of a storage closet. Jane scrapes her elbow on the painted exposed brick when he pushes inside her, her tailbone aching against the wall as she squirms against him, as she tries to get him deeper, as she tries to stay quiet.   
  
He holds her up, his hand pushing up under her shirt, and when his fingers brush against the twin points of puckered skin low on her left side, when he finds that ridge of scar tissue, he whispers the word, “fuck,” against her mouth. The sound of it makes her ache, so she closes her eyes.  
  
She imagines she can hear him saying her name.  
  
She imagines she can hear him say, “come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on -- ”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She can imagine a black parking lot, the stench of her own blood.  
  
She did not die there. She did not die. She did not die. She did not --  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _N I N E ;_**  
  
  
  
  
Much like the first time they fucked, Reg and Jane completely write off the second time they fuck as well.   
  
It is another thing that did not happen between them. It is a non-event. It is something they will only mention, privately, to each other, when provoked.   
  
They coexist through the beginning of December this way: ignoring each other as people and interacting solely in a professional context.   
  
“What you do to Duffy now?” Evrard asks her one morning. He stops by her desk and leans heavy against the edge, his arms crossed over his chest and a bemused smile threatening.  
  
Jane looks up at him over the frames of her glasses. “I don’t understand the question,” she says.  
  
“The question is, Janey, what you do to Reg to get him acting so squirrelly with you?”  
  
“He’s not acting squirrelly,” she says defiantly. “Rodent-esque, perhaps, but that’s nothing new.”  
  
Evrard looks like he wants to laugh. “So defensive, Janey.”  
  
“I didn’t  _do_  anything to him.” She gestures her hands wildly as she says it, unsure what that’s supposed to signify save for all the things she did not do to Reg.  
  
Evrard laughs as he steps away from her desk.  
  
 “If you say so!”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
That evening, she sits with Reg in the breakroom as they go over phone records and split the leftovers of a cold pizza.  
  
“Evrard thinks we’re acting weird,” Jane says around the pen cap she’s chewing on.  
  
“Evrard’s weird,” Reg says almost petulantly and Jane snorts.  
  
Jane looks up and so does Reg, and it feels friendly, sort of. Just as Jane is about to open her mouth (to say what, she still hadn’t decided) when Lou bounds into the room.  
  
“You eating my pizza? You’re eating my pizza. I was  _saving_  that special! Come on!”  
  
“Sorry,” Jane says, her mouth full of the purloined pizza.  
  
“You gotta label that stuff, Lou,” Reg says with a shrug.   
  
“You two?” Lou says and he points at the both of them. “You two are on notice.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The third body corresponds with the third time they sleep together.  
  
Jane does not like to think of it that way.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane gets a call from Sweeney at six in the morning. A Fordham student has gone missing.  
  
“Get over to Duffy’s,” Sweeney tells her, “pick him up, and come meet us at the school.”  
  
Jane does exactly that. She drives over to Reg’s building, kills the ignition, and buzzes up to him. He lets her in, a grumbled greeting of, “You’re early,” when he opens his front door, his shirt unbuttoned and untucked, his tie draped around the collar. Jane arches an eyebrow and steps inside.   
  
He leaves her alone as he goes into the bedroom to finish getting ready, and Jane tries not be obvious in how she studies his apartment. She has never been here before.  
  
His apartment smacks of anonymity. No pictures on the wall, no mementos personalizing the place. His apartment is that of a man in flux, a man caught between two points. An apartment nondescript.  
  
They fuck again that night, the third time, when she brings him back to his place. She agrees to go up with him. They agree they are going to review the case files. But she leaves the files in her car and they drink whiskey instead of coffee, and they are not even that drunk, not even that angry when he knocks his hips against hers, when she smears her mouth over his, when they both realize the height difference between them isn’t going to work in their favor even with the kitchen counter as leverage for her; that they’re both tired, tired but not angry, not drunk, when they stumble back into his bedroom and he fucks her long and slow on his unmade bed.   
  
There is no catalyst here. No obvious trigger, a break in the pattern.  
  
She leaves shortly after they both have come. Her car’s still parked illegally on the street. She lays there naked beside him, both of them laying across the bed, their legs hanging off the edge, and she starts laughing.   
  
 _You sure you want this case?_  Sweeney had asked.  
  
 _This isn’t going to be pretty_ , he said.   
  
“God,” she sighs, and the bed creaks as Reg shifts next to her. “I could go for, like, a million, trillion cigarettes right now.”  
  
“What,” he drawls. “Keep adding your sins to the pile?”  
  
“That,” she says, “Or I could really just do with a cigarette right now.”  
  
He chuckles, the sound almost warm, and that’s when she sits up.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
This happens again, and again after that. His apartment becomes familiar to her -- his bed, familiar; his body, familiar. She knows what the bones of his ribs feel like under her hands, that he is wiry and lean beneath all those suits of his, and that he likes the feel of her mouth at his throat, right at the corner hinge of his jaw.  
  
She knows that he uses cinnamon toothpaste instead of the spearmint she uses at home.   
  
She knows that he keeps his shoes lined up neatly in his closet but he never remembers to shut his closet doors, he never remembers not to leave his bath towels on the floor. She has seen this. She has been witness to this, to him, to his life.  
  
Each time they do this, each time she comes over to his place and they fuck -- more often than not they don’t even fight first, the feigned foreplay no longer necessary, and what that says about them, she does not ask -- she exits quickly.   
  
She no longer says to him, “This never happened.”  
  
She no longer sees a point.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
(The first night she stayed over she had not intended it. In fact, that first night she was so mad at him, furious and spitting mad. She was as close to hating him as she had ever been, and he -- based on the evidence -- had seemed to feel the same.  
  
The evidence: Reg biting her bottom lip until he made it bleed.  
  
The evidence: Reg pushing her facedown into the mattress, fucking her from behind, fucking her so hard she could barely breathe, couldn’t stop her body from shaking beneath his.   
  
That night she had been angry, but that night she had also been drunk.   
  
After he fucked her, she rolled over and away from him. She thought about getting out of bed. She thought about how wet her thighs felt, how she could feel him leaking out of her and how she should do something about that, but she didn’t.  
  
Reg turned off the light. Reg laid down beside her. Reg did not say a word.  
  
She passed out some time immediately after that. After he turned off the light. After he laid down beside her.  
  
After he did not say a word.  
  
She woke the next morning with her face pressed into his bare back, his body curved away from her, and she had never felt more disgusted.  
  
She left quietly. She did not want to wake him, but she was coming to know him now, know him in such a personal, intimate way, habits belonging to him now second nature to her, tells she would have considered once concealed now closer to an open bluff -- two bodies in close proximity, two bodies in collision, and she knew he was awake.  
  
They rode to that fourth crime scene later that day in complete silence, the girl from Fordham found, and the only thing they would come to speak of was that dead girl at the scene, that dead girl that came before this dead girl (and the girl that came before that, and the girl that came before that) --   
  
two bodies, two bodies in close proximity, two bodies in collision.  
  
Two bodies multiplied by two).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane walks out of the FBI building in Federal Plaza with Sweeney. The press is waiting for them, and Sweeney looks to Jane, expecting her to speak.  
  
Jane takes a deep breath.  
  
“The FBI is, as of now, not involved in the investigation, though . . . ”  
  
Reg is waiting for her back at her desk.  
  
“Thanks for throwing our entire case under the fucking bus.”  
  
That night, Jane drinks too much.  
  
That night, Reg pushes her down in his bed and she likes that.   
  
She hides her face from his, she tries to hide how much she likes that.  
  
And then she stays the night --  
  
a break in the pattern, the pattern cannot hold.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _T E N ;_**  
  
  
The annual NYPD Christmas party isn’t for another week, but it’s Augie who decides that they as a squad need to celebrate that Friday night.   
  
“Now, now, now, see here,” he says that morning, hitching his pants up, imitating Sweeney. “You are a reflection on the New York City Police Department, Homicide Division. I expect nothing short of sheer excellence and bravery at this affront to human decency, this grand show of festive debauchery. Put your game faces on, fellows. We’re going in!”  
  
That evening after work the five of them meet over at McLane’s bar, the hole-in-the-wall near the precinct frequented almost exclusively by cops. The owner of the bar is a former detective himself, some guy by the name of Reynolds, an old friend of Jane’s father.   
  
It turns out that Augie was right to coin the night as an affront to human decency (a grand show of festive debauchery). Everyone except Evrard gets absolutely shit-faced.  
  
“You teetotaling tonight?” Lou asks him.  
  
Evrard holds up his hands. “I’m gonna have one or two, but I swear, I come home drunk again thanks to you fools, my wife’s gonna kill me.”  
  
“I come home at all, my wife’s gonna kill me,” Augie jokes. Lou cocks his head towards Augie and looks at him as though to say,  _you dumb-ass_.  
  
 They have taken over the round table at the back of the bar, over by the dartboards and close to the back hall leading to the restrooms. Jane is sitting beside Reg, but more or less ignoring him. She can feel him looking at her, and she wants to tell him to stop it. She doesn’t need Evrard pulling her aside again to ask what she did to Reg, or her what her deal is with Reg, or oh hey Jane are you fucking Reg?  
  
Because that’s the thing, she thinks. It’s no longer just that they slept together, that it was a one-off thing both of them could pretend was a figment of their shared imagination. They are still sleeping together. She is still lying to Matt, still blaming everything on the job.   
  
While Lou and Augie dissolve into an argument (refereed by Evrard), Jane turns to Reg.  
  
 “What?” she asks through clenched teeth.  
  
“What?” he repeats, more question than accusation.   
  
“Stop staring at me,” she hisses. “People will think you’re creepy.”  
  
She can recognize the expression on his face. It’s the one he adopts when he feels insulted or backed into a corner. It’s the face he makes when he hears something just flat-out wrong and he can’t even begin to marshall an explanation as to just how wrong the person in question, and error, is.  
  
“I’m staring?” he asks. “Might want to get that narcissism in check there, Skip.”  
  
Jane’s eyes widen and she opens her mouth to argue when Lou slams the flat of his hand down hard against the table.  
  
“Tiebreaker! Impartial bodies,” he says, pointing at Reg and Jane. “We need your vote!”  
  
Lou thinks the evening needs to tread in the direction of Motown and wants to cue up some songs on the antiquated jukebox in the corner of the bar (“You play that Sugar Pie Honey Bunches of Oats song one more time, Lou, and I disown you as a friend and brother,” Augie warns) while Augie insists that nothing starts a party like a Journey track, or seven.   
  
“Do I look like someone who gives a crap about Motown or, what was it? Journey?” Reg asks. Per Jane’s suggestion, they play both.  
  
“The unlikely voice of reason,” Reg drawls, and Jane glares at him.  
  
Augie keeps ordering them rounds of eggnog, pronouncing himself their Ghost of Christmas Present, and his present to them is eggnog, and more eggnog after that.  
  
Lou takes a tentative sip of his eggnog.   
  
“You really have never had eggnog before?” Jane asks incredulously.   
  
“I know,” Augie agrees. “He’s like a virgin we get to defile.”  
  
Evrard chokes on his eggnog and then splutters as he coughs and laughs, Reg pounding him hard on the back.  
  
“This tastes like something a cat would drink,” Lou says after his first sip, a sour expression coloring his face.  
  
“Yeah,” Augie says, “A cool cat. Like me.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Lou and Augie are the first to leave. It’s hard to tell which of the two is drunker: Lou’s voice has gone very, very loud but still raspy and dark whereas Augie can’t seem to stand up straight. He keeps draping an arm across Lou’s shoulder and sort of falling into him, saying god knows what too close to his face, while Lou’s face keeps alternating between deathly serious and hysterically amused.  
  
“I’m gonna see about getting these two in a cab,” Evrard tells Jane and Reg, “and then get myself on home.”  
  
“You’re leaving too?” Jane asks him.  
  
“I got a wife, dear Janey. And I like her. She’s hot. I wanna go on home and get me some of that,” he says, and she laughs.  
  
Evrard points at the both of them.  
  
“Behave yourselves now,” he says, and Jane is too drunk to trust herself to respond to that.  
  
Jane goes home alone that night. She goes home alone that night, but not before Reg pushes her up against the wall across from the bathrooms, the hall dark and empty, his thigh between her legs, and she makes this terrible keening, falling noise against his mouth as she ruts against him.   
  
She wants to stay here, wants to stay in this bar, against this wall, pressed against him; she wants to go home with him, but the very fact she wants that, that she wants any of that, is what persuades her to go home.   
  
Home to Matt.   
  
She chain smokes three cigarettes she buys off the bartender before she hops a cab home. She had hoped the cigarette smoke would disguise the fact that she smells of men’s cologne. That she smells of Reg, his starched shirts, his skin, his cologne.   
  
 _What_ , he said,  _keep adding your sins to the pile._  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“You not smoking again, are you?” Matt asks beside her in bed.  
  
“Just tonight,” she says.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _E L E V E N ;_**  
  
  
  
  
The week before Christmas, the NYPD holds it’s fancy charity event at a hotel over on 44th Street. As parodied by Augie the week before, Sweeney makes a point to tell them all to attend.   
  
Jane borrows an old dress from her sister -- “You’re built like a boy, but this should look decent on you” -- and changes at the station.  
  
“You clean up nice,” Reg tells her at the open bar. She arches an eyebrow; she ignores the pull low in her gut, and reaches for her glass of scotch.   
  
He shouldn’t look at her like that in public. He shouldn’t look at her at all. It reveals far too much.  
  
“I have my moments,” she says, and Reg’s mouth quirks up slightly, something filthy spreading over his face. At that exact moment, Augie springs over, stinking of eggnog (“You didn’t get your fill last week?” she asks him), and throws his arms around both their shoulders. “Well, well, well, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Now if it isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge himself and, and, and . . . I don’t know who you’d be, Janey, but, maybe, like, Lady Scrooge. The Grinch. The Abdominal Snowman. James Caan in  _Elf_.”  
  
“I think you mean Abominable,” Reg corrects.  
  
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, Ebby Neezer Scrooge. Maybe Jane’s snowman’s got a six pack.”  
  
Jane laughs, and Lou and Evrard join them. Unsurprisingly, they do shots together at the bar while Augie sings a booming rendition of “Good King Wenceslas” and Lou tells some ridiculous story involving Augie and a stolen inflatable Santa Claus.  
  
Jane is enjoying herself. Jane is having a good time. She is having a good time, that is, until she spots him across the room:  
  
 Deputy Chief of Patrol Dan Costello.  
  
She throws back the rest of her scotch and orders another one.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When Dan Costello finally approaches her, she is alone with Reg at the bar.  
  
He approaches her and Reg -- Reg leaves. She stands there with Costello and they both watch Reg fold in with Sweeney, and then she loses him to the crowd.  
  
“You balling Reg Duffy?” Costello is still surveying the crowd and does not look at her when he asks the question.  
  
Jane raises both eyebrows, her eyes wide over the rim of the glass she holds at her mouth.   
  
“Wow, no foreplay?” she asks. He turns to face her. “Then again, if I do recall, that never was your strong suit.” She smirks as she takes a long pull from her drink, as she watches the way Costello’s eyes narrow.  
  
“Jane,” he starts evenly.  
  
“Play to your strengths, I say,” she interrupts. “Go straight in for the kill.”  
  
“So it is true then?” he asks, and this time, it’s Costello who is smirking.  
  
“Not sure where you gather your intel there, Chief, but no. Sorry to disappoint.”  
  
“Really,” he says plainly.  
  
“Yeah, really. Though not sure if it’s the ‘no’ you’re questioning so much as the faux apology I tacked on the end there.”  
  
Costello ignores her. “See,” he says, “I’d heard you two were quite the intrepid pair these days. Getting along real nice and all. Figured that meant you were sleeping with him. After all, this is you, Janey. The only men you can tolerate are the ones you’re balling.”  
  
Jane frowns. She doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s the complete opposite that is true without showing him her hand. That her and Reg don’t get along at all, not really. That, yes, they can work together, and yes, they can get this job done. But the getting along real nice, the intrepid pair -- it ends there.  
  
“You still with your civilian?” he asks suddenly and she nods. She nurses the remaining sip at the bottom of her glass and lets her gaze wander back to the crowd.   
  
She is not going to talk about Matt. She is not going to tell Dan Costello about Matt. Those wires won’t cross.   
  
And if she is not going to tell Dan Costello about Matt, then she is not going to tell him about the nights where she tells Matt that she’s working late. The nights where she tells him that she might just crash down at the station, big case, big hours, not worth the trek home. She isn’t going to talk about those same nights, the nights where she provokes Reg, where she pushes and she tells herself that she isn’t doing it on purpose. That what he is is wrong and she is right and she needs to be the one to tell him this. So they fight. So she calls Matt and she tells him she’s working late, a big case, and she finds Reg and needles him until he gives.   
  
She makes him give. That’s how she reads this. And if that is a wrong reading, if in fact she is wrong and Reg is right, she is going to need him to come and find her. She’s going to need him to make his excuses, and push her until she gives. Push her until she admits that he is right and she is wrong. Push her until she admits they’ve been playing for the same team this whole time, until she lets him put his mouth on hers, open her legs, find that one spot that’s tender and still makes her ache.   
  
But she’s not going to tell Dan Costello that either. He already assumes too much.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She finds Reg outside smoking a cigar, his bow tie undone and limp about his collar.   
  
“Your Costello is a real sweetheart,” he says.  
  
She smirks, but she doesn’t comment.  
  
“What you ever see in him anyway?” Reg’s voice is thick with drink and thick with the smoke from his cigar.  
  
Jane leans back against the wall beside Reg. She rubs her hands over her bared arms. It’s too cold to be outside without a coat, but there she is. There he is.   
  
She shrugs then, looks at Reg when she says, “I don’t know. I forget.”  
  
He takes another drag off the cigar, and she can’t read the expression on his face.  
  
“Evrard left,” she says. “You seen Lou or Augie?” Reg shakes his head, his face lost in an exhale of smoke. Jane breathes in deep, lets his cigar smoke fill her lungs.   
  
“Those two clowns,” he says. “Drunk as two skunks last I seen them.”  
  
Jane just nods, unsurprised. But then, she is drunk too. Then, Reg is drunk. It’s different though, she knows. Lou and Augie have managed to maintain the giddy frat boy stupidity that accompanies drinking too much, whereas with Reg, whereas with her, there is something routine to it. Something insidious, something habitual. They drink, and their lesser selves make themselves known. They drink, and they can still see clear.  
  
“You going back in?” she asks him.  
  
Reg shakes his head again. “Was thinking I head out, in a few,” he says, and it’s all he says.   
  
When he looks at her, she knows. She knows that she was right when she told Dan Costello that he was wrong. She can barely tolerate Reg; sleeping with him has only made it that much worse. Standing with him outside that hotel, outside the ballroom, the night cold and threatening snow, he looks at her and she knows that later that night she will be tasting that cigar he’s smoking off his tongue, tasting it from inside his mouth. She knows that she will not return home, not tonight, that she will warm her cold hands against his skin, that she’ll let him do the same, and none of this will be because she can tolerate him. None of this will be because fucking him makes him that much more tolerable.  
  
It will be because of the exact opposite.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane leaves the party with Reg.   
  
They climb into the same cab together, and Reg is not shy with her. He keeps his hand on her thigh, the fabric of her sister’s dress keeping his skin from hers, but she likes that. It heightens things, she thinks. He rubs his hand over the dress, over her thigh, and she likes that, too.   
  
She shivers when his mouth closes over her earlobe, shivers again when he hisses against her ear, “why can’t I stop . . . ” and leaves the thought hanging there, abrupt and cut-off.   
  
It unnerves her when he softens to her. His body, hard and menacing against her, but him, Reg, softened.  
  
She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she kisses him. In the back of a cab she kisses him earnestly and he kisses her back; he crowds her back against the door, the handle digging into her side, and she can feel a slight draft through the window.  
  
She can’t remember if she called Matt. She can’t remember if she needs to call Matt. She can’t remember why that matters, what will happen if she doesn’t call him, if she didn’t call him.  
  
She lets the thought slip away as the cab approaches Reg’s apartment.  
  
She lets the thought slip away as Reg slips his hand beneath her dress -- his hand on her thigh, his skin, hers.   
  
She shivers again.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _T W E L V E ;_**  
  
  
  
  
The week of Christmas, another girl goes missing. She knows she’ll be working through the holiday. She does her shopping during her lunch break two days before Christmas Eve.   
  
The day after Christmas, the girl has been found.   
  
It’s the same story as all the other girls: a strangled body, blonde hair, a black crucifix painted on the wall.  
  
The third day of interviews, the third day of working with the influx of information on the newest victim, she doesn’t even think about it:  
  
She goes home with Reg. They order takeout from some suspect looking Chinese restaurant around the corner and she uses his cinnamon toothpaste to get the taste of garlic chicken out of her mouth. They compare phone records belonging to the assorted victims until one in the morning.  
  
Reg yawns noisily and stretches. When he stands, his knees crack, and Jane snorts; she calls him grandpa as she stands up too, and Reg merely glares at her.   
  
“I’m hitting the hay,” he says, and turns towards the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it off as he goes.  
  
Jane follows him. She leans heavily against the doorjamb as she watches him brush his teeth.  
  
“I was thinking, I might . . . ” she says awkwardly. Reg spits into the sink and turns the faucet on. What she meant to say was that she was thinking of continuing to dig through the records. That she was thinking of hitting the hay, too. That she thinks she’ll go home. That this isn’t a good idea. That what they have found here is a patch of thin ice and she’s not entirely sure how much longer it’s going to hold their weight.  
  
“You were thinking what?” Reg asks. He wipes his mouth on a towel and steps over to her. He switches the bathroom light off and they stand there in shadow. He looms over her in the doorway and Jane looks up at him, equal parts unsure of herself and irritated with him.  
  
He steps around her, their bodies brushing against each other, him clad only in his boxers, her still fully dressed, and he looks over his shoulder.  
  
“Come on then,” he says, as though they are speaking in code.  
  
And as though they are speaking in code, she nods. She shuts off the hall light and she follows him into his bedroom.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“What you think the deal is with the blondes, huh?” she asks as she settles in bed beside him.  
  
“Gentlemen prefer them apparently,” he drawls, and Jane rolls her eyes.  
  
“No, but really. Like, is that a thing? A guy’s got a real preference, only wants to make it with blondes?”  
  
“You tell me, Blondie,” Reg says. He winds a thick strand of her hair around his finger and pulls gently.  
  
“Stop that,” she murmurs, and reaches up and grabs at his wrist. He stops pulling, but he doesn’t let go of her hair.  
  
“Prior to . . . ” he gestures generally, sort of at the bed, and Jane tips her head back, curious as to what he’s going to call  _this_ , whatever this is. It turns out nothing, because he trails off, and then pauses. He starts again, “Every woman I was ever attracted to enough to wanna ask out, or, you know, whatever, was a brunette.” His fingers are still dragging through the ends of her hair. “Not that I hopped into bed with you on account of the color of your hair,” he says. She can hear the smirk in his voice, and Jane leans heavily against his shoulder.  
  
 “Yeah,” she teases, “and I certainly didn’t hop into bed with you on account of your lack of hair.”  
  
“Ah, a comedian, huh,” he says, and he tugs on her hair harder. Jane rolls with it, her body pressed against his side, her face resting against the center of his chest.   
  
She could ask him why he hopped in bed with her in the first place, but she’s not entirely sure she wants to hear the answer. She’s not entirely sure she knows what her own response would be.  
  
He was there, and she needed him.   
  
There’s that, she thinks, but you don’t say that sort of thing out loud. You don’t say a lot of things out loud. For example, she will not say that they have crossed a line tonight. She came over to his apartment, they ate dinner together while discussing the case, and then she got into bed with him.  
  
She got into bed with him as though they did this every night. As though they were domesticated, as though one needed the other in order to sleep. The thought leaves her unsettled, but she does not move away from him.  
  
Instead, she opens her mouth against his chest and kisses the skin there. His breath hitches, and she can feel it more than she can hear it. He tangles his fingers in her hair, so she kisses him again. She kisses down the length of his chest and dips her hand under the waistband of his boxers.  
  
She sucks him off, swallows down around him, and tries to hold his hips down with the flat of her hand.   
  
He says her name thickly when she first takes him into her mouth. He says her name again, and again after that, his fingers still pulling at her hair.  
  
There is something undeniably satisfying about getting Reg to say her name like that -- to pant it the way he is, the way he mixes her name with the word fuck, like they both mean the same thing. He says it like she’s the one destroying him, and simultaneously, the only one who could save him.  
  
She wonders if she says his name like that. She wonders if he thinks the same thing about her, because she’s seen it, she’s seen the way he looks at her after he makes her come. It’s like he wants to see how much closer to a breaking point he can push her, just how strong the seams that keep her stitched in truly are -- see if this time he can be the one to rip her open, rip into her, and place his name on that wreckage.  
  
She swallows when he comes, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.  
  
He’s on her instantly, kissing her mouth open, pushing her legs open.  
  
She only says his name once.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The feds are brought in after the explosion.  
  
The responding officer to the scene of the next victim --  _blonde girl, I’d say 20? 21 years old? there’s a big old cross on the wall though, and_  -- is killed when a bomb wired to the victim’s stove goes off.   
  
The FBI claims jurisdiction, and Jane and Reg wear matching scowls as they watch Sweeney duke it out with the bureau chief the FBI brought in with them.   
  
The FBI experts flown in from D.C. call this behavior escalation. They say that their killer is escalating. The use the word  _their_ , the word  _escalating_.   
  
When Reg asks what that means, what that means for them, he gets several different answers.   
  
It means the killer is losing control. It means he’s asserting control. It has nothing to do with control. It means he is bored. It means he’s getting sloppy. It means he wants them to think he’s getting sloppy. It means he wanted to make a statement.  
  
“It means you don’t have a goddamned clue,” Reg snaps. Beside him, Jane folds her arms over her chest but she doesn’t say anything, not even when the expert (Hutch or Hitch or something like that) looks to her as though to back him up.   
  
She’s with Reg on this one.  
  
“Police work’s always had a good deal of guesswork to it,” he says as they step back out into the cold towards his car. “But these assholes? These guys are a step away from palm readers and fortune tellers.”  
  
Jane nods solemnly in agreement, and then holds a hand flat over her stomach.  
  
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Reg asks as they stop in front of his car.  
  
“Ugh, I ate too many taquitos with Lou.”  
  
“He take you to that Mama Guillermina’s or whatever?”  
  
 Jane fixes him with a plaintive glare. “Don’t remind me.”  
  
“You probably got a tapeworm from there, you know,” he says as he swings the driver’s side door open.  
  
Jane groans as she drops into the passenger seat. “I said don’t say anything, Reg.” She’s quiet as she buckles her seatbelt and Reg looks like he’s trying not to laugh at her. “You can’t get tapeworms from eating taquitos anyway. Can you? Can that happen?”  
  
Reg starts the car.  
  
“I don’t know. How many you eat?”  
  
“I don’t know. All of them.”  
  
“All of them? Tell me, Jane, what is the numerical value for ‘all of them,’ I ask you.”  
  
“Like, eight?” she guesses. Reg raises his eyebrows.  
  
“Eight, Jane? Eight? You at war with your digestive tract or something?”  
  
“Not all of us have as bland a palate as the great Regis Duffy. And besides, I was hungry.”  
  
“Hey, I’m not the one with an army of tapeworms setting up camp somewhere down in my stomach lining.”  
  
“Okay, I am hardly a scientist or a doctor or anything worm-related, but I am about 98% sure that is not in fact how tapeworms operate. I have also decided that people do not get tapeworms from eating taquitos. Look at Lou. Strong as an ox. Eats that shit all the time.”  
  
“Lou has a natural immunity. Lou’s Puerto Rican.”  
  
“Well, that’s just not fair.”  
  
“That’s life.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The funeral for the dead cop is two days later.  
  
She attends with Reg, her in a nice black dress, and Reg in his dress blues. He drives them there, and they ride in silence. The ride back is just as curiously tense, just as devoid of conversation, and when he parks outside her apartment building she doesn’t move.   
  
Reg kills the ignition without a word and they sit there, the sun already setting, and Jane smoothes her hands over her dress. She needs to run up and change. The two of them are returning back to the station after she changes, after she grabs the files she left on the kitchen counter before the funeral.  
  
“Did you know him?” she asks suddenly. Her voice seems too loud for his car. “The officer who was . . . did you know him?  
  
Reg says, “No,” but he says it reluctantly, as though admitting that is a concession he would rather not have to make.  
  
“Me either,” Jane says. Reg doesn’t acknowledge what she’s said, and Jane sits there. She is unsure what is so different about this funeral. The two of them have attended scores of them, funerals for fallen officers they have known well and loved and funerals for relative strangers. The only difference Jane can derive for this one is that this man died because of their case.  
  
“You don’t ever feel the least bit guilty?” he finally says, as though he is thinking along the same line she is. He’s watching the road, the bumper of the car parked in front of them. She thinks what he means is the dead cop. But they’re sitting outside her apartment building. They are outside her apartment building and she knows that Matt is inside. She wants to believe that Reg is referring to the dead cop.   
  
“I don’t know,” she finally sighs.   
  
He turns to look at her, but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her. He looks at her, and his eyes are tired, sad and tired.  
  
“I gotta get in and get changed,” she says. And that’s when he moves for her, his hand on her thigh, sliding higher over her stockings. She spreads her legs, but god, they don’t have time for this. He bites at her neck while he rubs her off between her legs, his fingers pushing at her, at the barrier of her stockings, the fabric wet. She should warn him not to leave a mark. She needs to warn him not to leave a mark. But she doesn’t say a thing. She likes his mouth against the column of her throat. She bends her knee, her heel balanced on the edge of the seat, her skirt raised and bunched around her waist. She pushes her hips into his hand, and it’s Reg that groans.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane goes up to her apartment with the collar of her jacket raised, covering her neck.  
  
She calls to Matt as she enters the apartment that she’s gotta run -- she just needs to grab a few things.  
  
She changes quickly and surreptitiously in their bedroom. She winds a scarf around her throat to hide the raw reddened marks Reg left there.  
  
She snatches the files off the kitchen counter and leaves with a small wave.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _T H I R T E E N ;_**  
  
  
Sometimes she thinks about telling Matt.   
  
Whenever she imagines this scenario, it always occurs in the morning, over breakfast. Sometimes she imagines him frying eggs, other times measuring out coffee grounds. Other times still doing nothing at all -- he is just there, waiting, in the kitchen they share, and she must come to him and confess.  
  
In these scenarios, she would walk into the kitchen and she would say, Matt there is something I need to tell you.  
  
She would say, Matt you remember that Reg Duffy?  
  
Yes that Reg Duffy. That terrible Reg Duffy. That Reg Duffy that made me cry so I made you hold me. Him.  
  
I’m fucking that Reg Duffy.  
  
 _You know what? By the time you’re done I bet you’ll end up thinking I’m your favorite because at least I’m honest._  Reg said.  
  
 _So am I._  She said.  
  
Matt gives her an out, just the once. He gives her a chance to come clean.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 _So am I_ , she said, but she said it to Duffy. She said it that gray morning, and that was so long ago.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s mid-January. She returns to their apartment at nine in the morning on a Saturday.  
  
“Jane,” Matt says. She has been waiting for this.  
  
“We need to talk,” he says.  
  
Jane drops her bag to the ground. She toes off her boots, gray slush spilling from the soles of them onto the hardwood floor, melting quickly.  
  
“Alright,” she says quietly. She crosses her arms over her chest and she says to him: alright.  
  
“I’m just, I’m just gonna come out and ask it. You seeing someone else?”  
  
Jane lets her gaze go flat. Jane has always been good at rationalizing her own behavior when she wants to do it. Always been able to look at the things she does and find a neat spin to it, find a way to say  _you did this and it was in your control, you did this for reasons better than others would assume._  
  
When she was fifteen years old she started smoking Marlboro Lights. She started smoking Marlboro Lights because her mother had always smoked Marlboro Lights, but she did not smoke them because she wanted to be her mother. She smoked them in ironic imitation, as homage made defiant.   
  
 _Anything you can do, I can do better._  
  
Mimicry designed to demonstration control.   
  
She smoked them as that final  _fuck you._  
  
She was sixteen when her father found out she was smoking. To say he found out is deceptive. It implies that Jane attempted to hide the habit, and this is not true. She was bold with her sole minute rebellion. She was sixteen and she was behind the bar, working the bar, and right there, right in front of him, she took a cigarette out of the pack and she lit one up.  
  
Her father said, “Oh, Janey,” and then took a cigarette from his own pocket and joined her.  
  
She told Reg this one night. She told him a variation of this story. This was when she had first started staying over. This was after she would flee minutes after he came, after she came, rearranging herself in his bathroom, using his toothpaste and his mouthwash, before swinging her way out of his apartment, legs still trembling, heart still beating too fast as she covered her mouth with her scarf against the cold, against New York at two in the morning.  
  
His bedroom was dark. His bedroom was empty, his entire apartment empty. That fit him in a way she didn’t like to analyze. That fit him in a way that on anyone else, the fit would have made her sad.   
  
Her mouth had felt rubbery and used as she lay there next to him, and she had turned her head slightly, hair spilling everywhere, to find him still awake on his back.  
  
“I started smoking when I was fifteen,” she said to him, a random non sequitur. They had not been speaking of smoking, of her childhood, of his. They had not been speaking at all.   
  
He had not turned to look at her when he said, “Yeah?” He did not look at her as he let the pause stretch and fill the room, did not look at her when he murmured low, “Real long time to be a smoker.”  
  
She didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t know why she confessed it then, and it has never been something she has sought to rationalize. It was their version of pillow talk: naked truths about themselves. Violent facts, mundane facts, gruesome facts.   
  
Their lesser selves laid bare.  
  
“My dad,” she said, quiet, into the pillow, their bodies were not touching. “My dad,” she said, “he got a scare few months back. Thought it was lung cancer.  
  
“We made a deal,” she said. “He quits, I quit.”  
  
Reg hadn’t said anything. He had not asked that obvious question --  _it been hard?_  That question with the foregone conclusion.  
  
He would do the same with her, tell her things she had no business knowing. Tell her the sort of things no one ever asks you about but that you carry with you all the same.  
  
She thinks it all can be traced back to that hospital upstate when she walked out the door with him.   
  
That hospital, the morning after,  _this never happened_.  
  
He told her he had never killed a man before. There was a confession to those words, a strange gravitas they both attempted to belie with humor, but it was there.  
  
One night he told her that he saw his ex-wife at Grand Central Station.  
  
“What were you doing at Grand Central?” she yawned.   
  
“I like the trains,” he said, irritation bleeding through. She was missing the point, he didn’t say. “Doesn’t matter,” he did say.   
  
“How long you guys married for?” she asked.  
  
He had chuckled. “Too long, she’d say,” he said. “Long enough, I’d say.”  
  
“What happened?” Jane asked.  
  
“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know,” he said. She knew in that moment that he was not evading the question, but rather that he honestly did not know. Things fall apart. Collateral damage. Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.  
  
His hand was curled around the inside of her thigh, solid and warm, and it was the only part of him touching her.   
  
“Why you still wear the ring?” she asked.   
  
“Old habits, I guess.”  
  
She had not liked his answer then, but she had not pressed it. She thinks she understands it now, or she understands it as she sees it.  
  
The ring makes her tolerable to him.  
  
 _Her_  meaning Jane.  _Her_  meaning anything short of the job, short of his former marriage, anything that could require any semblance of a commitment.  
  
The ring is a safety, a home base, that place that renders her The Other. She can understand it.  
  
As she sees it, she can understand that.  
  
In their shared apartment, Jane keeps her arms crossed over her chest and she looks to Matt.  
  
 _You know what? By the time you’re done I bet you’ll end up thinking I’m your favorite because at least I’m honest._  That’s what Reg said to her.  
  
 _So am I_ , she lied.  
  
“No,” she tells Matt.   
  
“There’s no one else,” she says.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _F O U R T E E N ;_**  
  
  
  
  
Reg thinks that he’s found their first break with this case.  
  
Jane thinks he is wrong.  
  
They get into it in Sweeney’s office, their two varying, competing theories -- he thinks it’s the super from one of the girls’ apartment building, Jane thinks he is oversimplifying it.   
  
More importantly, Jane doesn’t think they have probable cause. Sweeney sides with Jane, and Reg blows her off the rest of the day.   
  
The following day, a Saturday, Jane swings by his apartment. She buzzes up, simply says, “It’s me,” and it’s enough -- he opens the door for her.  
  
She has a twenty-year old bottle of scotch she holds up, equal parts triumphant and strangely sheepish, and says, “Peace offering?”  
  
They watch the Knicks game together, drinking that scotch, idly going over the case file -- the true subtext for her stop over; not the veiled apology, not the scotch, not the Knicks.  
  
He goes down on her sometime after the second half, the words, “peace offering,” mumbled hot against her hip once he has her panties peeled down her legs. She makes an amused, appreciative noise in the back of her throat, and he bites the inside of her thigh in response. He makes her come first with solely his mouth and his tongue, and then again on his fingers, again on his cock, making the muscles in her thighs jump and twitch, making her mouth hang open, everything boiled down to how he is fucking her against the arm of the couch.   
  
After he comes, he does not pull away from her. Her arms are still draped around him, and she likes the feel of his heart thudding against her. She likes to feel it slow, likes to feel his body relax, how his breathing returns to normal, the way he sighs like he just lost something inside of her.  
  
Jane butts her head almost affectionately against the cut of his jaw.  
  
“So these girls,” Jane says, her chin still tucked against his shoulder.  
  
He turns to look down at her.  
  
“You thinking about those dead girls while I’m fucking you?” He doesn’t sound angry when he asks it, but rather kind of incredulous.  
  
Jane’s face scrunches up. “No,” she says. “But now I’m kinda feeling guilty for not thinking about them.”  
  
“For not thinking about them while I fucked you.”  
  
“No, for not thinking enough about them in general. For fucking you instead of reviewing those case files.” For fucking you at all, she doesn’t say. “I’m feeling a little guilty about that, is all.   
  
“Don’t turn this into a thing,” she snaps.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 _You don’t feel the least bit guilty_ , he had asked her.  
  
She is finally learning how to say yes.  
  
Yes, I feel the least bit guilty.  
  
Yes. About all of that.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _F I F T E E N ;_**  
  
  
  
  
There are things Jane will never know because Reg will never tell her of them.  
  
These things include:  
  
How he thought she was dead in that hospital upstate. How he got the call and he was sure they would be too late, he was sure that a man doesn’t get lucky, not twice, not twice in one night, and he had called her over and over again the entire ride there, and not once did she pick up. He had been sure that she was dead then. He was sure that she was dead, that this Roy finally got what he wanted, what he had hoped his buddy would have achieved back at that motel, and he leapt from the car even before the sheriff got it in park. He leapt from the car, and the first thing they told him was that shots were heard fired down in the South Wing, down in the basement, and he had not even thought about it -- he ran straight there, his shoes squeaking wet against the linoleum;  
  
How if anyone would have told him when he first met Detective Jane Timoney that he would eventually fuck her, that not only would he fuck her once but again and again after that, that he would want her, that he would need her in a near horrifying visceral way, he would have laughed and then spit in their face;  
  
How the night Jane was shot he stayed at the hospital the entire time until she was out of surgery, until she was in the clear. How he threw up during his second hour at the hospital, how his shaking hands only reminded him of her, how long it took to wash her dried blood off of his skin;  
  
How he almost decked some asshole detective from Organized Crime when he overheard him at a bar talking. The clown made some comment about how that’s what you get when you got girls working as dicks, and when Reg approached him, when Reg asked, “You talking about Detective Timoney?” the detective responded, “That the broad’s name?” Lou had to grab Reg by the arm and pull him away, and there are few fights Reg regrets not getting into, but this ranks as one of them;  
  
How much he hated her that first night she stayed over at his apartment. How he was furious with her, furious with himself, furious all the more when she left without a word the following morning;  
  
How rattled that funeral for the dead cop left him. He didn’t know how to explain, didn’t know if he’d ever want to, but he realized what was so strange about the funeral as he drove Jane to her apartment: it was the first police funeral he had attended since Jane had been shot. It had been the first cop he had helped bury since she had been shot. He had been thinking of her, thinking of burying her, so he touched her in his car, wanted to get inside of her, wanted to feel her warm and wanting, wanted to be sure she felt alive;  
  
How long Evrard has known about the two of them -- that evening Evrard took him out for some drinks and kept looking at him like he wanted to say something but didn’t quite know how to broach the subject. Finally Reg had turned to him and said, “Spit it out, Velerio.”  
  
“You’re a good guy, Duff,” he said.  
  
“But?” Reg asked.  
  
“I ain’t said nothing to no one, but,” and at this Evrard downed the remaining beer in his glass. “I know about you and Janey.”  
  
 “Me and Jane, huh,” Reg said. He sat there silent for a beat and then turned back to Evrard. “What’s there to know ‘bout me and Jane?”  
  
“You really gonna play it like that?”  
  
“Like what?”  
  
“Dumb.”  
  
Reg had flagged down the bartender and ordered another round for the both of them.   
  
“Man, I’m not stupid,” Evrard said. “I’m not Calderon and I sure ain’t Blando,” he said and then he laughed, like there was a story there he had no interest in sharing let alone knowing. “I’ve seen you guys. The way the two of you . . . are with each other.”  
  
“You’re telling me that you have assumed that I am sleeping with Jane because the way we act ‘round each other, that it?”  
  
“Nah, man, I’m saying that’s part of it.” Evrard paused. “I saw you guys.”  
  
“Saw us where?”  
  
“Where haven’t I seen you two fools. Saw you guys leaving the Christmas party, get in a cab together. Saw you two down at McLane’s. Don’t know how drunk you two idiots were, or if you thought you were in the clear or something, but I saw you two over by the bathrooms.” Reg had averted his gaze. He knew exactly what Evrard was talking about, or at least he thought he did. The memory was hazy, but he remembered the night well enough: the bar, McLane’s, all those shots Blando kept ordering, how Blando and Calderon had cut out early, how drunk he was, how drunk Jane was, how he was feeling reckless and so was she -- how as of late they had seemed to mirror each other with more ease, without intent. He could remember how her hand would brush against his knee at random under the table, how that made him stupid, how he did the same until his hand wasn’t just brushing against her at random, but rather remained there, his hand high on her thigh, his fingers toying with the inner seam of her jeans. He wound up stumbling into her outside the bathrooms, he wound up pushing her against the wall, biting at her jaw while she rubbed at him through his trousers.   
  
He couldn’t look at Evrard. It was too embarrassing, too embarrassing imagining what he and Jane must have looked like, drunk and stupid and all over each other.  
  
“So you know then, huh,” was all Reg said, his eyes glued to the muted sports clip show playing on the mounted television.   
  
“I know.” Evrard was watching the television too. “What I don’t know is what the hell you are thinking, Reg.”  
  
Reg took a long sip of his beer.  
  
“You think thinking’s got something to do with this?” he said, and then he laughed, quiet and mocking;  
  
How his mother knows of Jane, how she came over to his apartment one Sunday morning, disapproving of the apartment, disapproving of his ex-wife, had disapproved of her when she was his actual wife.  
  
“I was talking to Judy in 3A,” she said to him, potatoes frying on the stove, Reg brewing her the decaf coffee she only drinks.  
  
“Yeah, Judy in 3A,” he responded, distracted.   
  
“You know what she say to me? She say to me her husband Roland see you downtown with a real mean looking blonde. What’s that about then? You dating now? She Irish?”  
  
He told her it was nothing. He told her that it was just a fellow detective. That they had been working that case, that real awful case with all those dead girls. He told her about that, yeah, Ma? He told her about that.   
  
He did not use Jane’s name and he did not look at his mother as he spoke to her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He does not tell Jane anything about this -- about Evrard, about his mother, about how terrible they both are at keeping secrets, and what he will not know is that Jane has kept the same sort of evidence to herself. She does not tell Reg about Dan Costello. She does not mention the Christmas party. She does not tell Reg about Matt. She does not see a point.   
  
He won’t tell her how terrible they both are at keeping secrets, except for from each other.  
  
He won’t tell her that ‘a real mean looking blonde’ is the most apt description he has ever heard for her.  
  
He does not see a point.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _S I X T E E N ;_**  
  
  
  
  
Their case does not improve. Their case is going poorly.  
  
Things fall apart.   
  
Collateral damage.   
  
Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“What are we doing?” Reg asks while Jane toys with a ball of rubber bands at his desk. “Just waiting for this guy to get sloppy?”  
  
The answer, she thinks, is yes. There’s a certain degree of ego associated to serial killers. There’s pride there -- pride in the kill and pride in getting away with it.  
  
She shoots a rubber band in Augie’s direction and then shrugs at Reg.  
  
She doesn’t feel like fighting with him, so she shoots a rubber band at Augie, she shrugs at Reg, and then she walks away.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
That weekend they fought bitterly.  
  
For the first time he had come up with her to her apartment. Matt was out. Matt was on a skiing trip with his son. He had not even asked Jane if she wanted to join them. She’s never going to call him on that one.   
  
And maybe it was because he was on his turf, Reg mentioned Matt for the first time.  
  
“Where’s Matt the Boyfriend at?” he had asked as he surveyed their kitchen.  
  
She has been able to stomach the guilt on her own. She can stomach whatever it is she feels when she leaves Reg’s apartment and returns to her own, when she returns to Matt. But Matt’s name in Reg’s mouth, Reg in their apartment -- it was too much for her.  
  
“He’s out of town,” she had said, and Reg had nodded.  
  
“So this has taken on every shade of a tawdry affair then, huh? Bring the other man around when the boyfriend’s out of town?”  
  
“Oh god,” she sighed, exasperation coloring her words in almost an amused tone. “You wanna turn it into that? Are you seriously  _trying_  to guilt trip me?” He had not responded to her, and that only made her angrier, only seemed to confirm what she had asked. “Jesus Christ. Just go, Reg. Fucking go. Get out of here.” The exasperation to her voice had bled away, or maybe the exasperation stayed. Maybe the exasperation was always there, always present between them, that unannounced third party. But her voice had started to strain under the weight of it as she told him to leave. She started to strain under the weight of it, under the weight of him.  
  
“Leave,” she said, something wild there, something feral.  
  
And he did. He left.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
A week later and Jane is begging him to stay.  
  
A week later and another missing girl. A week later and Jane heads down to the bunk to grab a quick nap. She needs some sleep, she’s not getting enough sleep. Jane keeps dreaming of dark parking lots. She keeps dreaming about broken glass sticking in the palms of her hands. She’s dreaming about motel rooms painted in black and the sudden patter of gunfire in the distance.  
  
She needs some sleep. She needs to collect her thoughts.   
  
Reg finds her down there and as sure as he enters the room they start fighting. She wants to drive down to Jersey that evening and reinterview one of the victim’s boyfriends; Reg accuses her of grasping at straws. The two of them don’t even get going, the argument barely begun, before Reg is heading for the door.  
  
“Jesus, Jane, I don’t got the energy for this,” he says and Jane sits up straight.  
  
“Wait,” she hears herself say, and he stills, his hand on the doorknob.  
  
“Stay,” she says. “Just . . . for a minute. We don’t have to, you don’t have to say anything, or, or, listen to me. But. Can you just. Can you. Stay?”  
  
His shoulders slump, but he steps away from the door. He turns to face her, slouches back against the wall next to a shelf full of out-of-date police manuals and safety guides.   
  
“Jane,” he finally says. He says it like a warning.  
  
He warns her, but he stays.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
This is how she remembers things. She remembers these things as being entirely on her.   
  
She wants him to leave and he’ll go.  
  
She wants him to stay and he will.  
  
Sometimes he will.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _S E V E N T E E N ;_**  
  
  
“We’re hanging out on a ledge here aren’t we,” she says. She says it quietly and her voice is swallowed up by the gloom and din of the bar. He hears her though, she knows this, but he does not respond. He looks down at his hands, his wedding band still on his ring finger.  
  
“Pretty soon we’re gonna have to go and figure out if we’re going over, or.” She doesn’t finish.  
  
He doesn’t respond, not in words. He makes a derisive noise in the back of his throat.   
  
“What,” Jane drawls, “the premeditation ruin it for you? You’d rather we just keep crashing into one another whenever the mood persuades?”  
  
“I’d rather we not talk about it, how’s that,” he says thickly, acidly.   
  
Jane takes a pull from her bottle of beer.  
  
“Not yet?” she supplies.  
  
Reg sighs. “Not yet.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Earlier that day, they bring a man in for questioning. They arrest him, bring him in under police custody.  
  
It is the super from one of the victim’s building, on par with Reg’s initial hunch.  
  
His initial hunch will prove wrong, will prove a misdirection, but for the first time this entire case, they have their closest avenue to a suspect.  
  
They get a guy in custody.   
  
It’s February. It has been over four months since she was shot. She had not realized she had been counting the time, but it hits her that day, it hits her as they question this man, a stranger, unrelated to her shooting, in the interrogation room. It has been over four months.   
  
Jane passed her psych evals with flying colors.   
  
“You seem to be coping well,” were the doc’s exact words.  
  
“You’re healing well,” the doc at the hospital told her.  
  
“You look good,” Reg said.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
But Jane can’t stop dreaming about motel rooms painted black.  
  
She can’t stop dreaming of a rope at her neck, black paint on the wall, her blonde hair spread out across the floor.   
  
Jane can’t stop.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
( _Why can’t I stop_  . . . Reg asked her).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jane finally breaks.   
  
She comes so close to freaking out in the interrogation room once they get this guy, once she starts questioning him with Reg, and Reg must notice. Reg interrupts suddenly, and grabs her by the elbow and wheels her out into the hall.   
  
“What the fuck are you doing?” she asks, voice low. “What are you -- ”  
  
He drags her into an empty interrogation room and she’s shaking. Her hands are shaking ( _me too_ , he said,  _it’s the adrenaline_ ).   
  
“You need a minute,” he tells her, his voice laced tight with authority.   
  
“I don’t need,” she starts to say, but the words go soft on her. They break in the middle.   
  
“There’s nothing  _wrong_ ,” she tries to say, but her bottom lip begins to tremble.  
  
She turns her face away from him. She holds her hand over her face, and the sob that escapes her throat, muffled slightly behind her hand, is still too loud in the empty room. Reg doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even touch her, not at first. He lets her cry alone. He doesn’t ask her what’s wrong or why she’s crying. He doesn’t call her unprofessional and he doesn’t tell her to pull it together. He just stands there, guarding the door, and she doesn’t know if he’s there to keep her from leaving or to keep others from entering.   
  
When her cries start to border on the hysterical, he finally steps towards her. He wraps his arms around her --  _remember that Reg Duffy who made me cry so I made you hold me_  -- and drags his fingers through her hair. He does not tell her that everything is going to be okay. He doesn’t say anything. He is just there, his body firm and unyielding against her own.  
  
Things fall apart, she wanted to say. Collateral damage.   
  
Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She needed him, and he was there.  
  
She does not know how to say that out loud.  
  
But then, she does not think she needs to anyway.  
  
She pushes him away and wipes at her face.  
  
“Let’s finish this,” she says to him, her voice even.  
  
Reg nods.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _E I G H T E E N ;_**  
  
  
  
  
There hasn’t been a body in over four weeks.   
  
Their killer has dried up, the trail has gone cold.  
  
Jane’s been working on a murdered Wall Street exec case with Lou. She’s moved on, Reg too. He just closed his own case: a man strolled over to the next-door apartment unit in Little Ukraine and bludgeoned his neighbor to death with a frying pan.  
  
In the interrogation room, he said he just wanted some peace and quiet.  
  
He said Reg had to understand that.  
  
Reg tells her about it that night. She talks him into trying out some trendy Chilean place on the Upper East Side they wind up forsaking in favor of their usual Mom and Pop diner.   
  
The night is soggy and wet, April Fool’s Day that Saturday. She can smell spring on the air, the rain lacking that bite of cold they had endured all winter.  
  
She snags a fry off of Reg’s plate and he shoots her a look.  
  
“So, our Crucifix Killer is just a footnote in history then, huh?”  
  
Reg smiles and finishes his coffee. “Sure the feds got the files stored deep in some backroom. Over on a shelf with the Zodiac files and the Black Dahlia case, who shot JFK.”  
  
“You’re sure about that?” she smirks.   
  
He shrugs. “It’s their case now,” is all he says. She knows he doesn’t mean that though. She had seen his face when the case was handed over to the feds -- the tight line of his mouth, the rigid carriage of his entire body. She had been with him that night when they got plowed at McLane’s with Evrard and Lou and Augie.  
  
“To being let off the hook!” Augie had proclaimed before they downed their first round of shots.   
  
“You heading home?” Reg asks as they leave the diner.  
  
Jane braces her hands on her hips and looks up at him. She squints against the rain and Reg raises the collar of his jacket under his neck.  
  
“Should I?” she asks, almost haughtily.   
  
They stand there staring at each other outside the diner, in the rain. His eyes are narrowed, his mouth twisted in a repressed smirk.   
  
“This the part where you make me say it?”  
  
Jane does not even try to disguise her smile.  
  
“Make you say what?”  
  
He looks at her the same way he looked at her in that hotel room upstate all those months ago. He looks at her the way he looked at her in her father’s kitchen, outside that hotel on 44th Street, at that corner table at McLane's.   
  
He looks at her as though, for him, she is intolerable.  
  
“I want you to come home with me,” he says quietly -- just enough of that disgruntled edge to his words for them, for him, to be tolerable for her.   
  
It makes this -- whatever this is, whatever this huge thing looming between them is -- tolerable.  
  
“Okay then,” she says, just as quietly. She smiles then, all teeth, and he rolls his eyes.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
This started outside the city, but they belong to the city. They belong to the city moreso than the city belongs to them.  
  
She will never not want to be a cop, and neither will he.   
  
When she steps out of the bathroom, Reg is already laying in bed, curled on his side, eyes shut, facing her. She moves to pull on her jeans, but she stops. Holds the jeans in her hands, still naked, and watches him. He doesn’t open his eyes to look at her once. She drops the jeans back down to the floor and wordlessly climbs back in bed with him. She presses her back against his chest, curves her own body to fit his, and he exhales loudly behind her. Wraps his arms around her, pulls her that much closer. She closes her eyes.   
  
“Don’t say anything,” she whispers.  
  
What she means is: don’t ruin this.  
  
His right hand brushes against the bare swell of her hip, and it’s only then that she notices it -- his finger is bare. There is no ring.  
  
 _Don’t say anything,_  she said.   
  
Don’t ruin this.  
  
She keeps her eyes closed and she lets her body relax against his. Against his hand, the ring finger bare, their lesser selves laid bare.   
  
He presses his palm flat against the twin scars on her abdomen.   
  
He leaves his hand there, as though still covering the wound.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 ** _F I N ._**

 


End file.
